The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan 9780520965584

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The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan

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The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan

Marcia Yonemoto

university of california press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Yonemoto, Marcia, author. Title: The problem of women in early modern Japan / Marcia Yonemoto. Other titles: Asia—local studies/global themes ; 31. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Series: Asia: local studies/ global themes ; 31 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016015752 (print) | lccn 2016017276 (ebook) | isbn 9780520292000 (cloth : alk. paper) | isbn 9780520965584 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Women—Japan—History. | Women— Social conditions—17th century. | Women—Social conditions—18th century. | Women—Social conditions—19th century. | Japan—Civilization—To 1868. | Japan—History—Tokugawa period, 1600– 1868. Classification: lcc hq1762 .y6435 2016 (print) | lcc hq1762 (ebook) | ddc 305.40952—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015752

Manufactured in the United States of America 25 10

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For Leah Julia and Emma Rose

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Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction Filial Piety Self-Cultivation Marriage Motherhood Succession Retirement Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

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1 21 51 93 123 164 193 217

225 259 275

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Illustrations

figures 1. A woman teaching writing, from Hōgyoku hyakunin isshu (Jewel-Treasures of the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets), 1721 / 62 2. Learning to write, from Onna kuku no koe (Multiplication Table for Women), 1787 / 63 3. Sample text from Nyohitsu shinanshū, a calligraphy manual by noted female calligrapher Hasegawa Myōtei, 1734 / 65 4. Learning to sew, from Onna daigaku takarabako (Treasure Box of the Greater Learning for Women), 1790 / 68 5. Sewing pattern and sewing instructions, from [Onna kyōkun, Hyakunin isshu, Yōbunshō] Onna manzai takara bunko (Women’s Precepts, One Hundred Poems for One Hundred Poets, Useful Phrases: Archive of Women’s Treasures of Ten Thousand Years), 1784 / 69 6. Women’s hairstyles, from Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women), 1688 / 74 7. Fashionable eyebrows, from Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women), 1688 / 75 8. Fashionable dress, from Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women), 1688 / 77

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9. From Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women), 1688 / 77 10. Illustration of the stages of fetal development and Buddhist ritual implements, from Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasures for Women), 1692 / 129 11. Updated illustration of the stages of fetal development and Buddhist ritual implements, from Takai Ranzan, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasures for Women), 1847 / 131 12. Stages of fetal development, from Takai Ranzan, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasures for Women), 1847 / 132 13. The fetus in the fourth month of gestation, from Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women), 1812 / 134 14. The fetus in the fifth month of gestation, from Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women), 1812 / 135 15. The fetus in the sixth month of gestation, from Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women), 1812 / 136 16. Woman nursing an infant with portrait of one of the sixteen Buddhist arhats, from Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Myōdensu jūroku rikan, Taben Sonja (Sixteen Curious Considerations of Profit: Taben Sonja), Tenpō era (1830–44) / 148 17. Woman arranging her hair while nursing an infant, from Utagawa Kunisada, Jisei hyakka chō, fūsha ni mimizuku (One Hundred Contemporary Birds: Owl and Pinwheel), early Tenpō era (1830s) / 149 18. Woman hanging mosquito netting with child, from Utagawa Kunisada, Kodakara asobi, kaminari (Playful Treasures of Children: Thunder), Tenpō era (1830–44) / 150 19. Woman cradling infant, from Utagawa Toyokuni III, Edo meisho hyakunin bijo, Tameike (One Hundred Beautiful Women and the Famous Places of Edo: Tameike), 1858 / 151 20. Woman nursing child under mosquito netting, from Kitagawa Utamaro, Furo kachō (Cloth-Tub Mosquito Net), nineteenth century / 153 21. Woman nursing child, from Kitagawa Utamaro, Meisho fūkei bijin jūnisō (Twelve Physiognomies of Beautiful Women in Famous Places), Kyōwa era (1801–4) / 154

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22. Dice game (sugoroku) on the theme of women’s life course, from Katsukawa Shunsen, Shinpan Onna teikin furiwake sugoroku ([Newly Published] Precepts for Women Sugoroku), early nineteenth century / 200

charts 1. Family of Itō Maki / 47 2. Family of Kuroda Tosako / 101

table 1. Household succession by adoption, including adopted sons-inlaw, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / 172

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Acknowledgments

The convention in acknowledgments in scholarly books, however outdated it may be, is to address professional debts before personal ones. While that structure made sense in a time when one’s personal life remained neatly in the margins of one’s academic endeavors, it does not seem to me to reflect the world I and most of my colleagues presently inhabit, one in which research trips merge into family excursions, people have pressing obligations at home as well as at work, and teaching assignments and faculty meetings are scheduled with an eye to the needs of spouses, partners, children, commuting, and the like. In other words, for twenty-first-century academic professionals, as for the early modern Japanese women and men I write about in this book, work, family, friends, colleagues, private and public life commingle in ways that were and are exhilarating, challenging, and productive, if sometimes also exhausting and always humbling. In this spirit, I should like to thank first and foremost the people who made this book and the entirety of my professional life possible: my wonderful, bright, funny, and loving daughters, Leah Yonemoto-Weston and Emma Yonemoto-Weston, and their father, my good friend and colleague for almost three decades, Tim Weston; my parents, James and Mary Yonemoto, who every day teach by example the values of perseverance and generosity and offer the wonder of unconditional love; my sisters in spirit—Anna Brickhouse, Beth Dusinberre, Susi Jones, and Sarah Krakoff—who have been pillars of steadfast friendship, exemplars xiii

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| Acknowledgments

of scholarly achievement, and models of caring and sensible parenting and partnering, as has, more recently, Phoebe Young; my extended family—the Yonemotos, Noguchis, Mamiyas, Hruskas, Fujitanis, Brugueras, Fudennas, Hondas, Shojis, Hamaguchis—who provide moral and material support, laughter, and a lot of food; and my partner, Bob Ward, who takes great care with everything and everyone, who reads every word and always writes back. To all of these people I offer my deepest gratitude, in full knowledge that that is not nearly enough. The irony is by no means lost on me that this book, which is on the nature of women’s roles in family and society in early modern Japan, was researched and written over a period of years during which my own children often were in the care of others. With this in mind I would like to thank the staff of Meguro Kuritsu Yakumo Hoikuen and Kids-Kids Hoikuen (both in Meguro-ku, Tokyo), as well as the faculty of Boulder Montessori School, Mapleton Montessori School, Foothill Elementary School, Casey Middle School, and Boulder High School (all in Boulder, Colorado). Thanks also are owed to Clea Westphal and Brittany Zart, who were technically “babysitters” but really were de facto family members, and also to Maeshima Chiyoko and Minoru, Kaneko Erika and Yuzuru, and Toya Yūsuke and Risa and their children, who have generously hosted me and my family on countless visits to Japan over many years. In the Department of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder, my academic home since the day I arrived fresh out of graduate school, I have been extremely fortunate to be surrounded by a remarkable group of colleagues who are both excellent scholars and great people. In particular, I have benefited from the counsel of an unusually large number of accomplished senior women colleagues: Virginia Anderson, Lee Chambers, Barbara Engel, Martha Hanna, Susan Kent, Marjorie McIntosh, and, more recently, Lil Fenn, as well as Julie Greene, now of the University of Maryland, Susan Johnson, now of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the late Camille Guérin-Gonzales. Outside the history department, Christie Yoshinaga-Itano and Laurel Rodd provided much-needed advice and wise leadership. Fred Anderson, David Gross, Bob Ferry, and Mark Pittenger have been thoughtful and helpful in countless ways, and Tom Zeiler continues to offer his particular brand of encouragement via sarcastic humor. My superb colleagues in Asian history and Asian languages—Lucy Chester, Sanjay Gautam, Sunyun Lim, Miriam Kingsberg, Kwangmin Kim, Mithi Mukherjee, William Wei, Tim Weston, David Atherton, Keller Kimbrough, Faye

Acknowledgments | xv

Kleeman, Terry Kleeman, and Laurel Rodd—have made Boulder a stimulating and congenial place to study and teach about Japan and Asia. Because this book was so long in the making, it (and I) benefited from the counsel and assistance of many. As always, Mary Elizabeth Berry has been a steadfast supporter of me and my work and an uncannily astute critic of the project at every phase of its development. Kären Wigen is one of the best critical readers in the business, and her timely interventions and enthusiasm were essential in moving the book toward publication. Anne Walthall simply knows everything about the history of Japanese women and has been extraordinarily generous and helpful in her readings of this and my other efforts to make sense of early modern gender roles and relations. Participants in two workshop conferences, one in Boulder in 2012 on gender and medicine in early modern and modern Japan and one in Berkeley in 2014 on the history of the family in early modern Japan, provided helpful comments on various parts of the manuscript, as have listeners at many talks in many venues. I would like to thank in particular Michael Emmerich, Linda Garber, Bettina GramlichOka, Adam Kern, Barbara Molony, Laura Moretti, and Wen-hsin Yeh for arranging opportunities for me to present my research, and Matthew Gerber, Drew Gerstle, Stephen Miller, Janet Theiss, Elias Tinios, and Jonathan Zwicker for insights, conveyed in person and in print, that made a difference in the book. Tachi Kaoru and the Institute for Gender Studies at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, generously provided an institutional home for me during the academic year 2005–6. Shiba Keiko welcomed me to her reading group, the Katsura no Kai, and introduced me to her many “women friends” from the Edo period. My former graduate student Risako Doi Smith served as my research assistant early on, and her thinking about a number of issues in Edo-period women’s history, most notably filial piety tales, has influenced my own. Eiko Kimbrough handled, with extraordinary efficiency and thoughtfulness, the voluminous correspondence with Japanese archives and libraries that led to permission to reproduce the nearly two dozen illustrations that grace the book. Numerous agencies, institutions, and programs funded the research and writing of this book. I would like to thank the Japan Foundation, for a Faculty Research Fellowship that allowed me to spend a year in Japan; the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Graduate Committee on the Arts & Humanities at the University of Colorado, Boulder, all of which provided additional travel and research

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funding; and the LEAP Associate Professor Grant and the College Scholar Award from the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, both of which afforded much-needed leave time. At the University of California Press, Reed Malcolm was patient and persistent in seeing the manuscript through to publication, Stacy Eisenstark, Zuha Khan, Rachel Berchten, and Sheila Berg ably handled production matters, and the editors of the Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes series—Jeff Wasserstrom, Kären Wigen, and Hue-Tam Ho Tai—encouraged and supported the project along the way. To all, my sincere thanks for helping make these ideas into a book. Marcia Yonemoto Boulder, Colorado December 2015

Introduction

In the eleventh month of 1681, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Inoue Tsūjo left her home in Marugame, on the northern coast of Shikoku, and began a journey to the “eastern capital,” Edo. After two weeks, Tsūjo and her traveling party, including her father and several servants, arrived at a border checkpoint in the town of Arai, west of Kyoto, where they presented to inspectors the official passports required by the shogunal government of all travelers. Much to their dismay, the Arai inspectors refused to allow Tsūjo to pass, on the grounds that her travel documents described her as a “woman” (onna) rather than what she appeared to them to be: an unmarried “girl” (shōjo, or ko-onna), wearing the long kimono sleeves that marked her relatively young age and marital status. In the diary she kept of her journey, Tsūjo wrote, “I was very upset, and not knowing what to do or how to get through this, I regretted my very existence. . . . [W]hatever one does there are so many obstacles if one inhabits the body of a woman. I could not stop thinking about how many things are difficult for us.”1 For the border guards, and for the shogunal government they represented, women travelers were particularly suspect. Wives of the 250odd daimyo, or local lords, were effectively held hostage in Edo along with their children. This policy of keeping wives and heirs “at the knees of the shogun” was meant to prevent rebellion by the daimyo themselves, each of whom was compelled by shogunal law to divide his time equally between Edo and his home domain. Officials at checkpoints 1

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| Introduction

along the official highway system therefore policed the movement of women on the road to and from the capital. This was likely the reason for the close scrutiny of Inoue Tsūjo’s travel documents and her detention in Arai.2 After a few days, having obtained replacement documents correctly describing her as a “girl,” Tsūjo and her party were allowed to continue their journey.3 Once in Edo, as planned, Tsūjo took up a post as tutor (jidoku) and attendant to the mother of Kyōgoku Takatoyo (1655–94), daimyo of Marugame, a position to which she was appointed by the daimyo himself and which she would hold for eight years, until the older woman’s death in 1689. At that point Tsūjo, at the age of thirty, returned to Marugame, married a local official, and had five children, one of whom preserved and published his mother’s writings, including the diary quoted above. I begin with this anecdote about Inoue Tsūjo because it exemplifies several key aspects of what I have called the “problem of women” in early modern Japan. For (male) officials, women were a problem in that they represented private interest and the potential for disorder to which that interest might give rise. As a result, women had to be surveilled and controlled. And yet, after several days of waiting, Inoue Tsūjo was allowed to continue to the capital, where her father left her alone to take up an official position of considerable prestige in a daimyo household. Furthermore, this was a post she had earned through her prodigious and precocious talents as a writer, a skill she had honed and practiced throughout the years when most women of her age and class were marrying and having children. In other words, Inoue Tsūjo lived her life in a way that should have been seriously problematic for a woman—she spent a long period away from home and family, she pursued employment in the capital, she postponed marriage and childbearing—and yet she managed not only to accomplish but also to succeed in her endeavors, in part because she benefited from the full cooperation and assistance of her family, especially her father. That a young woman should have such autonomy, relatively speaking, may seem surprising. For even as Inoue Tsūjo herself lamented the burden of being female, she did so while availing herself of a type of freedom, mobility, and authority that would have been nearly unthinkable for a woman of her status in imperial China or Chosŏn Korea. How and why was this possible? Tsūjo’s life begs the questions inherent in the title of this book: Were women a problem in early modern Japan? If they were, what was the nature of the problem they posed? For whom, and why? I endeavor to answer these questions, based on the evidence provided by a wide array of

Introduction | 3

extant sources written in the early modern period by and about women, their lives, their families, their work, their behavior, and their ideals.

defining the problem To begin, we must confront the idea that the problem of women as it was perceived and experienced by people in the Edo period was quite different from the problem of women as it has been construed by later observers, both inside and outside Japan. Equally important, “the problem of women” as it is defined here was not singular; the term does not refer to one or even several discrete problems that confronted women, either singularly or as a group. Rather, the problem of women as I conceive of it is shorthand for a process—a conundrum, perhaps—that has preoccupied thinkers and critics, men and women, in public and private, over a long period. Indeed, one could argue that aspects of the problem of women continue to occupy us today, as Japan confronts a shrinking population, declining birthrates, and public debate over gender equality at home and in the workplace.4 Like many social issues, the problem of women in the early modern period often has been defined in hindsight. Male Meiji-period Enlightenment thinkers were among the first to articulate a modern version of the problem: in 1885 Japan’s leading progressive thinker, Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) wrote, “Women exist at the mercy of men and their security and their fate are in the hands of men. . . . Women’s lives are nothing but a series of services, first to parents when young, then to husbands and parents-in-law when married.”5 Fukuzawa saw the subjugation of women in Meiji Japan as a symbol of the stifling legacy of the “feudal” system of the Tokugawa period, overly influenced as it was by fusty Confucian ideas. Without more enlightened perceptions of women and without actual changes in women’s roles and education, Fukuzawa and others argued, Japan could not hope to become as civilized as Western societies.6 Fukuzawa’s arguments dovetailed in some ways with debates among women educators and activists for women’s rights in the Meiji period, although the latter tended to see women’s rights as an end in itself. As women took advantage of expanded opportunities for education in the late nineteenth century, they began to demand changes in old practices regarding issues as varied as parent-child relations, temperance, marriage, employment, and freedom of speech. In an 1883 speech titled “Daughters in a Box” (Hako’iri musume), the charismatic woman orator Kishida

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Toshiko (1863–1901) declared that overprotective parents were “denying girls the freedom to grow and develop intellectually.”7 Likewise, Inoue Nao, a commoner woman from Saitama, wrote in an 1886 treatise that women should “stop clinging to ‘old Confucian ideas’ and free themselves from the shackles of old customs” in order to “restore” rights that they had possessed in ancient times, before the growth of Confucian ideas and institutions.8 The activist and writer Katō (Ishimoto) Shidzue (1894– 2001) recalled that her revered former samurai grandfather, on his death, bequeathed to her a silk wrapping cloth, a lacquered jewelry box, and a manuscript copy of the moralistic eighteenth-century Confucian tract on women’s behavior, Onna daigaku (The Greater Learning for Women). About the latter gift, Ishimoto wrote, “I cherished these three things with affectionate and reverent remembrances of grandfather. But later when I realized what was written in the manuscript, I could not help revolting against the conception of woman disclosed in this book. It was the epitome of all I have had to struggle against—the moral code which has chained Japanese women to the past. It made me see, not myself, but all women of my race, yesterday, today and perhaps tomorrow.”9 Western women observers echoed their Japanese contemporaries’ sentiments. Writing in 1902, Ishimoto’s American colleague and friend Alice Bacon stated that the progressive views of “new,” modern Japanese women often clashed with those held by previous generations: “It is when the active women of the new way of thinking, whose lives and thoughts are devoted to work and endeavor rather than to the passive submission and self-abnegation of the old days, find themselves suddenly placed among the surroundings of thirty years ago, that the change of conditions becomes most evident.”10 Although they differed considerably in background, status, and place of origin, these Meiji observers shared the conviction that the submissive Japanese woman was an artifact of the past and an obstacle to progress in the future. However, even as Meiji women activists decried the constraints of the past and advocated for expanded rights, they were careful to conform to certain aspects of statist patriarchal ideology, arguing that in order to properly perform their important roles as wives and mothers, women needed to be well versed in political matters, and this knowledge could only be attained by becoming educated and by attending and participating in public political meetings along with men.11 It should be noted that the emphasis on women as “wives and mothers” is primarily a Meiji construct; Tokugawa visions of women’s roles were, I argue, broader and more complex, and also occasionally contradictory and

Introduction | 5

ambiguous. They resisted easy categorization and defied expectations. They were, in short, problematic. One of my primary arguments is that when we read (or reread) the works of Tokugawa-period writers and critics, we see a picture of women’s lives in which women were far from passive. They played vitally important roles inside and outside the family, fulfilling as well as transcending the categories of wife and mother, and they were rarely subject to norms of sex-segregated seclusion that were more common for their female contemporaries elsewhere in East Asia. Indeed, for Tokugawa observers the issue was less the nature of womanhood itself and more that women’s actions had enormous potential to sow virtue and to wreak havoc. A learned woman was the essential foundation of a reputable household, yet an overly clever one was inclined to haughtiness and unseemly ambition; a cultivated and presentable woman was an asset to family and society, while a flamboyantly attractive one was bound to stir up chaotic desires; women’s reproductive powers ensured the allimportant perpetuation of a lineage over time, yet women’s sexualized bodies consistently endangered the integrity of the household. In this way, through their actions Tokugawa-period women, like their Meiji successors, both challenged and reinforced dominant power structures. This was certainly the case for commoner women of the peasant and merchant classes, but even elite women—typically seen as those most burdened by patriarchal gender roles—asserted their autonomy within the structure of family and community in direct and indirect ways.12 Finally, and importantly, unlike Meiji activists, writers and critics during the early modern period perceived that women themselves might provide solutions, not only for women’s problems, but also for larger social, economic, and political problems that subsumed gender difference. In order to understand how and why this was the case, we must look to the sources. Women in Text: Sources The following chapters discuss the problem(s) of women in historical context by drawing primarily on two types of sources: the first comprises the vast corpus of printed material on the subject of women in general or aimed specifically at women readers. These sources, which I characterize as the public discourse on women in the Tokugawa period, include prescriptive literature and instructional manuals for women (collectively referred to by Japanese scholars as joshi yō ōraimono, or

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instructional texts for women) as well as representations of women in fiction and drama and in woodblock prints and book illustrations. All of these texts were produced and circulated in considerable number via the commercial publishing industry, which flourished in Japan from the late seventeenth century on; in this way texts on women formed part of what Mary Elizabeth Berry characterizes as the early modern “library of public information.”13 While Tokugawa fiction and visual arts have been widely studied and translated into English and other Western languages, nonfiction sources such as instructional texts have dwelled in relative obscurity, receiving sporadic if occasionally intense scholarly attention and yet remaining little known outside scholarly circles. This is surprising, given their staggering number: over two thousand individual titles of Tokugawa texts on the subjects of women’s roles and behavior are extant.14 This figure stands as a measure of how seriously Tokugawa writers grappled with their version of the problem of women. Japanese scholars, primarily those interested in the history of education, have cataloged and analyzed these texts in great detail, but until quite recently scholars writing in Western languages have not accorded them much attention.15 One reason for this relative neglect is that prescriptive literature and instructional manuals have been seen as predictable recitations of moral platitudes outlining conventional roles—compilations, in other words, of unsurprising and perhaps uninspiring common knowledge. But it is precisely the conventional nature of instructional manuals that I find most useful, for I contend that these sources function as an intermediate discursive register, one that shows us how important topics were being conceptualized, visualized, and presented to a community of readers. The frequent revision and reissuing of key texts—the Onna Imagawa (Imagawa-Style Precepts for Women), initially published in 1687, was reprinted, in multiple variations, over two hundred times by the end of the Meiji period in 1912—gives us some understanding of how readers responded to published material in the form of demand for more and different types of information or more variations on a theme. Through the process of revision, ideals for women evolved over time into generalized principles that in theory were applicable to all, regardless of class or status.16 The public discourse on women was not static; it changed over time and circulated in a continuous loop that bound reader and writer. But how did women themselves internalize the gender-specific norms for conduct and behavior articulated in public discourse? We can begin to

Introduction | 7

address this question by turning to the second body of sources on which this book is based, namely, the substantial corpus of extant prose writings by women and their family members in the early modern period. These include diaries, memoirs, and letters dating from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century.17 In contrast to didactic texts, the majority of which were written by men, these personal narratives reveal how individual women grappled with the challenges presented by social, political, and legal norms for gendered behavior, the very norms reinforced in the prescriptive literature. The narrative sources examined in the following chapters include the diaries of the aforementioned Inoue Tsūjo (1660–1738), daughter of a local official from Sanuki Province on Shikoku, who left home in her late teens to live in Edo and serve as tutor to the mother of the lord of her domain; the memoirs and diaries of Nakayama Suzuko (b. 1675) and Kuroda Tosako (d. 1758), sistersin-law who were both wives of daimyo of low to middle rank and whose lives in Edo in the early eighteenth century were entwined by everyday occurrences as well as extraordinary events; the family diaries and reminiscences about Sekiguchi Chie (1793–1865), the daughter of a village headman in Yokohama who rose to a prominent position as lady-in-waiting in the shogun’s castle before returning to her home village; and the revealing letters written to her parents by Itō Maki (1797–1862), a woman of commoner birth who effectively moved into the lower echelon of the samurai class by becoming the wife of two successive shogunal retainers (hatamoto) and who, through unceasing work and vigilance, ensured that her children would improve their station as well. These narratives, selections from which are woven through each chapter of the book, exemplify how the proper performance of women’s duties often required bending and sometimes breaking rules and norms—and in the process reconstituted those rules and norms themselves. As revealing as these texts are, no study can claim to represent the experience of all women in a given place and time, and this one is no exception, for the narratives examined here, with one exception, were written by women who were born into, married into, or were closely affiliated with the samurai class. The outlier is the Sekiguchi nikki (Sekiguchi Diary), which was kept over a period of nearly a century and a half (1762–1901) by successive male heads of a wealthy peasant family in Musashi Province (present-day Yokohama) with numerous connections to the samurai class; it describes in detail the lives of the well-educated and accomplished daughters, wives, and mothers of the family, not only Sekiguchi Chie, but also her sisters, mother, and grandmother.18 The

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fact that all the women discussed here were literate makes them part of a small minority of the female population in the Tokugawa period.19 However, I think there are many reasons that their writings merit close examination. First, although they were the elite, surprisingly little has been written about women of the warrior class; as a group, they remain curiously understudied, especially in the English-language historical literature.20 At first glance, this seems odd, for while sources written by elite women are few, texts by nonelite women are even fewer. Yet, somewhat counterintuitively, although commoner women wrote less, historians have been able to say more about them because of the exceptionally thorough demographic records kept throughout rural and urban Japan over the course of the early modern period.21 Historians began mining these sources as early as the turn of the twentieth century, in great part to fuel the Marxist debate over Japan’s level of economic and social development.22 But it was the importance placed on social history “from below” and on demographic history in the postwar period, together with the development of the field of women’s history (josei shi) in the postwar Japanese academy, that resulted in a concentration of scholarly attention on social historical studies of the experiences of rural and urban commoner women. Elite women of the samurai and courtly classes, while not by any means neglected, have received relatively less attention in the scholarship. Nevertheless, they remain the subjects of highly dramatized and exoticized popular interest, in the form of televised historical dramas, popular novels, and the like. Furthermore, because of the prestige accorded to poetic composition by women in the classical literary tradition, many literate women inside and outside the samurai class devoted their creative energies to poetry. Poetic composition, while expressive of an individual’s consciousness and emotions, yields considerably less information about daily life and activities than does prose, and for this simple reason I have focused here on substantive prose accounts.23 Reading women’s life stories along with, and occasionally against, the prescriptive literature reveals the variety, tension, and dynamism inherent in the lived experience of women and men in the rule-bound yet flexible social and political system of Tokugawa Japan. Women in Context: Family, Gender Roles, and Life Course Focusing on the public discourse on women and on writings by literate women themselves allows us to situate the experiences of women who spent their lives in and around the samurai class in the broader context

Introduction | 9

of family, community, and society. I use narrative sources written by women to reveal how, in unique and unexpected ways, women’s most meaningful actions and thoughts centered on and in the household or family (ie). The family is far more than site or setting; if we are to understand anything about the complexity of women’s roles in the early modern period, we must begin with the family and its structure, for the family was the single most important institution shaping the life of any person in early modern Japan. Family roles were deeply ingrained and shaped individual consciousness in ways historians can only begin to interpret. Because the family was such a critical point of intersection with the social world at large, I turn now to three dimensions of familyas-context—family structure, family ties and gender relations, and women’s life course. Family Structure In early modern Japan, as in most times and places, family was not a fixed or natural category, for it was not defined solely by blood relation. We must ask, then, what and who constituted the early modern Japanese family? To what degree did family structure vary by class and status? And, most important for the present study, how did family structure and dynamics both constrain and enable the lives and actions of family members, especially women? Even a cursory study of the vast literature on the history of the family reveals the wide range of family structures across world regions and cultures, as well as the significant changes wrought in those structures over time. Research in the field of historical demography since the 1970s demonstrates the fallacy of the belief that pre- and early modern families everywhere were large, extended, and clanlike in nature and over time became smaller and more consolidated.24 Instead, the most common form of family structure in much of Western Europe, in Japan, and in Southeast Asia throughout the early modern period was what historical demographers refer to as the “stem family.” Stem families are not nuclear families, which consist principally of parents and their dependent children, nor are they compound or joint families, in which adult children remain after marriage, bringing their spouses and children into the larger kin group. Rather, in the stem family there are generally three coresident generations: the male household head, his spouse and their children, and often the parents of the household head. Only one child in a given generation, normatively (but as we shall see, not

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| Introduction

always) the eldest son, could inherit household headship; siblings of the heir, male and female, were expected to move out of the household, usually on marriage, and any who remained did so as unmarried dependents. In this manner, overall household size remained relatively small, resources were concentrated in fewer persons, and the family was more likely to be economically viable in the long term.25 Fabian Drixler describes the stem family as “the household arrangement that offered the best chance of perpetuating a single line and its property. . . . Nuclear families dissolve when the children leave home. Compound families, in which all sons remain part of the family, become so large in the course of several generations that they turn into lineages whose members no longer consider one another members of the same family. The stem family, by contrast[,] . . . can replicate itself indefinitely.”26 Of particular importance for considering gender relations within family systems, kinship in the early modern Japanese stem family essentially could be reckoned bilaterally; that is, while kin on the paternal side (patrilateral kin) had precedence in theory, kin relations on the maternal side (matrilateral kin) were also extremely if not equally important. In this way, in terms of their structure, Japanese families in the early modern period differed substantially from the joint or compound families characteristic of late imperial China and Chosŏn Korea. The normative succession pattern in Chinese and Korean families during this period was for a male heir, usually the oldest surviving son, to succeed his father, and while adoption of an heir was permissible in families without sons, the adoptee was supposed to be chosen from among patrilateral kinsmen. Adoption outside the kin group or adoption from maternal kin was, strictly speaking, prohibited.27 Normative succession patterns in the Japanese stem family, by contrast, were much more flexible. Although oldest sons had priority as heirs, younger sons and adoptees also frequently inherited, and heirs could be adopted from among matrilateral or patrilateral kin or could come from outside the kin group entirely. Furthermore, in Japanese stem families a daughter’s husband could be adopted as family heir, a practice that was rare in late imperial China and nonexistent in Chosŏn Korea.28 In Japan, adopted sons-in-law—referred to as muko yōshi—married into their wives’ families just as women married into their husbands’ families. They moved into the wife’s residence and assumed her family name, and they appear with notable frequency in the family registers of warrior and commoner families alike during the early modern period. In this way, the nature of kinship and succession in the Japanese stem family vested extraordinary importance in women, for

Introduction | 11

though daughters (or widows) could not permanently inherit household headship, they and their families could and did effectively engineer succession through the female line by marrying in sons-in-law or arranging heir adoptions from among matrilateral kin. By the early eighteenth century the stem family seems to have become entrenched among elites and widespread among all classes.29 While the size of coresident groups varied according to wealth and resources, the organizing principles of the stem family were common across class and status groups. For the ruling samurai class, succession along stem family principles was necessary to maintain the family’s most important asset: its name and its continuity into the future. As stipended bureaucrats in a time of peace, samurai had only an abstract tie to the lands they ostensibly controlled and from which they derived their wealth and power. The key to a samurai family’s success was therefore concentrated in the person of the household head and, by extension, his heir and successors. Only the designated heir could inherit his father’s rank and office and the income that came with it, and perpetuate the family lineage by producing a viable heir of his own. In great part because the stakes of family continuity were so high, the greater flexibility of Japanese stem family succession practices—frequently including adoption— reinforced the otherwise tenuous hold many samurai families may have had on their socioeconomic position. Among commoners, the development of the stem family was a corollary of rapid economic and population growth in the first century of Tokugawa rule. As growth slowed at the end of the seventeenth century, the threat of resource scarcity began to loom large in many regions of Japan. In the 1600s, when new or reclaimed lands were still available to be brought under cultivation, large families practiced partible inheritance whereby the head of a honke (main, or “root,” house) would establish his male children and their families in one or more bunke (branch houses) on parcels of the main family’s land, where they became independent entities who remained closely linked to the main family for shared resources.30 By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, land had become scarce and many domains began to ban partible inheritance on the grounds that it encouraged the division of landholdings into parcels too small to support a family. At the same time, domain leaders also implemented regulations prohibiting the marriages of landless sons who were likely to make a claim on familial resources.31 The move toward consolidation of a family’s land and wealth was also due to the growth of the market for labor, which allowed a large family to make

12

| Introduction

itself more economically competitive by shedding distantly related kin and hereditary or long-term servants who could gain employment elsewhere. Among merchant families succession practices often involved incorporating male employees into the family via adoption, often as sons-in-law.32 The result of these shifts in inheritance, marriage, and kinship practices was the emergence of the stem family as the dominant form of social organization. In addition to providing for the future, the stem family system had profound effects on the nature of family life itself. For instance, although modern Western observers often think of family ties as “natural” and based primarily on kinship, in the small and selective early modern stem family the ties of familial affiliation were complicated. Political, economic, and social considerations, all centering on the importance of continuing the lineage, were at least as important as actual blood relations, a durable characteristic of Japanese families that seems to baffle outside observers even today. As “foreign” as it seems, however, the corporate, non-kin-centered functions of family were not unique to Japan: the etymology of the English word family (from the Latin familia) reveals that it was originally used to refer to a group of servants (famuli) who worked for the same employer. The word entered into common usage in France, England, and Germany only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even then it continued to refer to all persons living under the same roof, whether they actually were kin or not.33 Similarly, in both elite and commoner families in early modern Japan, membership was based on an individual’s practical function or role as much as it was on any ties of kinship or affect, real or putative. Family ties could be created through marriage or adoption, but they could also be severed, and individuals could be and often were dismissed from the family by divorce or the “return” of an adoptee to his or her natal family.34 Families were highly functional entities, strategically engineered to maximize success, not only in the present, but into the future as well. In these ways, the early modern Japanese stem family perhaps resembled a corporation more than it did the intimate, affectively bound kin group that modern observers have come to intuitively define as “family.” To say that families were “strategically engineered to maximize success” is not to suggest that individuals within a family did not have real affection for each other; as we shall see in the excerpts from diaries and memoirs, children, parents, siblings, and more distant kin were often as devoted to each other as members of a modern family normatively imagine themselves to be. One could even ague that, perhaps because actual

Introduction | 13

families were such highly constructed entities, the rhetorical and ideological ties between parents and children intensified over the course of the Tokugawa period. For example, as I discuss in chapter 1, norms of filial piety began in the late seventeenth century to focus more intensely on the natal family and the emotionally laden sacrifices daughters made for their parents.35 Likewise, in chapter 3 I show how the rhetoric of motherhood and maternal attachment, largely absent from popular discourse in the seventeenth century, became a major theme in verbal and visual representations of women and families in the mid-eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the deep emotional ties between mother and child and the great sacrifices made mothers made and the losses they experienced for their children. These were cultural tropes, to be sure, but ones that did not make sense outside of the context of the stem family. Family Ties and Gender Roles A central argument of this book is that the structure of Japanese families allowed women to assume especially important roles in the maintenance and continuity of the family that went far beyond birthing and raising children. Women were key players in the family not only as wives, daughters, and mothers but also as in-laws, adoptees, laborers, household managers, and de facto heirs. I argue that this multiplicity of overlapping roles meant that early modern Japanese women could and did deploy many distinct forms of power within the family setting. My research thus confirms the observations of anthropologists and sociologists—albeit on the basis of quite different sources—who posit that women’s standing in the Japanese stem family differed fundamentally from that of women in patrilineal joint families in late imperial China. As G. William Skinner has put it, whereas in Chinese joint families there was a “consistent, thoroughgoing male bias,” in Japanese stem families “structural features alone greatly restrict the scope for gender bias.”36 For example, in the villages Skinner studied Japanese women and men had complementary and commensurate roles in the family in terms of their labor, their spheres of authority, and their interdependence. Power relations within marriage and the family were much less skewed in favor of men and husbands, to the degree that Skinner calls the early modern Japanese family system one in which patriarchy was notably “attenuated” and women wielded considerable “conjugal power.”37 While Skinner’s research focused on the peasant class, I argue that the same tendencies can be seen in families of the warrior class, who

14

| Introduction

tended to conform to normative Confucian-influenced patterns of marriage and succession in theory more than they did in practice. As Nagano Hiroko contends, women in the warrior class, especially those in highranking daimyo households and in the shogunal house, controlled the ritual life of the household and managed the affairs of the women’s quarters, including marriages and childbirth and child rearing. These were roles with a distinctly public dimension and thus had considerable importance in the maintenance of the state, whether domainal or shogunal. Although women could not hold office, their roles in the “inner” quarters complemented men’s work in the public sphere.38 The proposition that gender hierarchies even within elite Japanese families did not conform to the norms and standards of Confucian patriarchy—at least to the degree that they did elsewhere in East Asia—also is supported by the work of the intellectual historian Watanabe Hiroshi. Watanabe, best known as the author of seminal works on the interpretation of Neo-Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan, shows that in contrast to classical Confucian doctrine Edo-period instructional and religious texts from the seventeenth and eighteenth century consistently emphasize ideals of conjugal harmony and intimacy over those of male dominance: husbands and wives should be “compatible and loving” (aiwa shi), “affectionate” (mutsumajii), and “warm and close with each other” (tagai ni nengoro ni shitashimi aite).39 Complementarity and compatibility were not simply ideals, Watanabe asserts; they evolved naturally out of a family structure in which men and women mixed freely and, unlike the situation in elite Chinese families, the absolute separation of male and female spheres was the exception rather than the rule. Women also worked alongside men, for every household was itself a productive unit, or as Watanabe puts it, a family-as-business (kagyō). This held true in principle for elite families as well as for commoner ones, for even women of high rank were expected to take charge of ritual observances and maintaining the cultural and social networks of the family, and they also directed the day-to-day management of provisioning the household, supervising servants, and ideally, in their spare time, doing needlework. In short, Watanabe argues, a woman in early modern Japan could fulfill her family duty and express her morality in many different ways. This was because the goal for the early modern Japanese family was to ensure its practical and ideological survival, and in this enterprise women were fully integrated and indispensable, and not only for their reproductive capabilities. As subsequent chapters show in greater detail, in the context of the early modern family, there were many other means,

Introduction | 15

besides bearing children, through which women could contribute to the perpetuation and well-being of the family. For instance, precisely because they did not enjoy the formal prerogatives of status, women had more latitude than men to marry strategically into families of greater wealth or higher rank; they functioned as de facto heirs by marrying “in” an adopted son-in-law/husband; they were themselves sent out or brought in as adoptees as a way to solidify political ties between families or bring economic gain to their natal families; and they helped negotiate the marriages, divorces, and adoptions of their own children and stepchildren. One might still argue that women’s roles were shaped by the demands of the family itself, thus making women pawns of an essentially patriarchal family system. There is no doubt that the first part of this claim is valid: for the most part women did not control the exact nature of the social roles they would assume, and often they had little say over when they would assume them. But in most cases neither did men; the fate of a noninheriting younger son, for instance, was neither promising, nor desirable, nor the result of individual free choice. Just as women were strategically married out to other families, younger noninheriting sons might be compelled by family economic necessity to be sent out for adoption or marriage as an adopted son-in-law, both of which were preferable to languishing at home with no prospects for economic or social independence. In other words, everyone in the stem family played a role that was, to a considerable degree, beyond his or her control to determine. The problem for women in the Tokugawa period was not that there were established, gender-specific roles within the family; such roles, as Watanabe Hiroshi notes, were both functional and necessary. Rather, the problem lies in assuming that the existence of gender roles was evidence of patriarchal domination. There is ample evidence to refute this idea. For example, in the context of early modern Japanese politics and society, action within the family sphere—women’s as well as men’s—could not be disregarded as private or inconsequential. As in imperial China, in Tokugawa Japan official discourse privileged the family as the foundation of political order, and its internal functioning represented the social order writ small. That is, by emphasizing the importance of continuity across time, the stem family promoted a notion of organic community encompassing past ancestors, present family members, and future descendants. These communal familial notions, in turn, were enmeshed in overarching idealized concepts enforcing the dominant structures of the state.40 The principle that “managing the family is the basis for managing the state” endowed family matters with vast importance in the public realm and, at the same

16

| Introduction

time, invested women, who were normatively in charge of the inner realm of the household, with particular forms of power. Women’s importance in the family thus carried ideological weight outside the family as well as within it and, as we shall see in coming chapters, was for many women the source of validation from within and commendation from without. Life Course Family structure and family needs presented opportunities, yet also placed constraints on women. But of course a woman’s place in the family and society was not static; it changed over time, and thus what was appropriate or desirable behavior in one phase in life was not in another. As the anecdote about Inoue Tsūjo on the road to Edo reveals, behavior that was innocuous and permissible for a girl was dangerous and forbidden for a woman. In similar fashion, a woman in middle age in charge of running her household might be roundly criticized for indulging in literary or artistic pursuits, while an older, retired woman was likely to be praised for undertaking the same endeavors. And of course appropriate speech, clothing, hairstyle, and personal ornamentation were all calibrated to a woman’s age as well as her social and marital status. It is clear that to a considerable degree a woman’s stage in the life course set parameters for her behavior. For this reason the chapters of this book move temporally through successive phases of a woman’s life, each engaging a central “problem” or concern: filial piety (chapter 1) for daughters, self-cultivation (chapter 2) and marriage (chapter 3) for girls and young women, reproduction (chapter 4) for women of childbearing age, cultivating an heir and ensuring succession (chapter 5) for mature women who were responsible for managing households, and retirement (chapter 6) for women who had passed on household duties and responsibilities to the next generation. These were to some degree normative phases, which may or may not have corresponded to a woman’s actual age; young widows, for example, might make life choices more similar to those of much older, retired women. I chose to foreground the issue of life course for several reasons. One is that much scholarly writing on the Tokugawa period has focused on issues of status and class. There is good reason for these emphases, for people’s lives were defined (though not always confined) by the status or occupational group into which they were born, and economic necessity guided decision making at the most basic levels. But being attentive to the temporal dimension of the life course is especially important, I would argue, for understanding gender

Introduction | 17

relations and women’s experience in this period.41 For instance, age or seniority could significantly enhance an individual’s status within the family, for an older woman might have greater decision-making authority than a younger man, especially if that younger man happened to be her son or grandson. There are numerous examples of mothers and mothers-in-law wielding exceptional power, even political power, in the family context. The mothers of shoguns and daimyo and their heirs were known to have particular influence on their sons, and in the early eighteenth century factional rivalry among the women of the shogun’s inner quarters embroiling the wives, mothers, and concubines of present and retired shoguns spilled over into succession struggles during the reigns of Tokugawa Ietsugu (r. 1713–16) and his successor, Tokugawa Yoshimune (r. 1716–45). In commoner families as well, as we shall see in chapter 6, older matriarchs, although retired from household managerial duties, continued to wield considerable economic and social power, both inside and outside the family. Seniority was, in these ways, a niche that afforded women distinct forms of temporally bound autonomy and influence. Although women’s and men’s authority generally increased with age, daughters as well as sons could occupy their own power niches. A daughter was a resource to her family in many ways; in families of rank, she could serve as an important connection—a social, political, and economic conduit—between her natal family and her husband’s family. Talented daughters could also bring respect as well as revenue to their families through various means, usually service in households of rank and upwardly mobile marriage. Filial daughters, as discussed in chapter 1, could also avenge injustices done to their elders and gain public recognition for their deeds. Women’s range of acceptable choices as well as their subsequent actions—and the degree to which those actions were socially or politically sanctioned or not—were thus determined by a nexus of contextual forces: gender, status, and class, certainly, but also age and stage in the life course. Understanding this temporal dimension of norms and principles contributes to the complexity of the problem of women. Women’s Lives and Historical Change In addition to moving through a woman’s life course, each of this book’s six chapters treats one aspect of the complex set of problems caused by and for women in a society premised on the establishment and maintenance of political and social order. Woven into each chapter are narratives of women’s lives, accounts that give us perspectival views of

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| Introduction

distinct moments in the early modern period: the turn of the seventeenth century, the early eighteenth century, the turn of the nineteenth century. In this way, I engage in close readings of primary sources and examination of case studies with attention to trends, patterns, and data that reflect the evolution of key social institutions, such as marriage, reproduction, family structure, and life course. To put it in socialscientific terms, the book offers time-specific synchronic interpretations of texts connected by a diachronic analysis of perceptible, sometimes measurable change across time. While the synchronic detail provided in texts and narratives presents itself relatively clearly, diachronic change is not as evident. Many of the following chapters identify one or several turning points with regard to the specific theme under discussion, and those turning points tend to converge at critical moments, most notably, the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth. This is the point at which, for example, filial piety tales turn violent, as daughters begin to seek bloody revenge against the enemies of their fathers; at the same time, instructional texts on women’s self-cultivation, previously aimed at elites and at parents, begin to address directly any and every woman. It is also at this time that images of mothers and motherhood—curiously absent in the early Tokugawa period—begin to appear in various forms of popular literature and visual arts. In terms of inheritance patterns, among samurai families there is a noticeable increase in the practice of adoption for succession purposes in the mid- to late eighteenth century. The importance of the late eighteenth century is not coincidental; indeed, this is a period often characterized by historians as a watershed moment: for example, it has been described as a time of crises—natural and political—and of high-level reforms to address them.42 It is a period that saw the emergence of new and vibrant forms of fiction and the maturation of ukiyoe printmaking.43 As mentioned above, literacy became truly popular by the early nineteenth century, and mobility, especially among commoners, also peaked at this time, as exhibited in the unprecedented numbers of travelers and pilgrims—women as well as men—taking to the roads.44 Finally, it is also in the late eighteenth century that historical demographers identify a major shift in fertility patterns, with a decisive move toward declining family size.45 These diachronic processes of change over time are the threads that connect the synchronic viewpoints provided by individual lives, case studies, and analyses of textual sources. The convergence of the diachronic and the synchronic ultimately supports a point emphasized throughout the

Introduction | 19

book—that the problems discussed here are not merely those of women. The problems confronted and engaged by women and their families were manifestations of larger, encompassing processes of social, economic, and political change, and if we neglect the former we fail to appreciate fully the latter. Joan W. Scott’s contention that gender is a “useful category of analysis” is now taken as a truism in the history profession.46 The present study attempts to show how gender is fundamentally imbricated in historical change by examining early modern women as individuals with distinct life experiences and also by discussing “early modern women” as a discursive category. It also explores the problems women faced in the early modern period as well as the problems historians encounter when interpreting their thoughts and actions in ways that make sense to us.

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chapter 1

Filial Piety Among human practices, none is greater than xiao [filial piety]. —Confucius, from the Shuo Yuan, Lau and Chen, eds., A Concordance to the Shuo Yuan

Father and mother are like heaven and earth, father-in-law and mother-in-law are like moon and sun. —Isome Tsuna, Onna jitsugokyō (1695)

In the early Tokugawa period, the ideals for women’s filial behavior articulated in published texts centered on the image of the devoted wife, often an empress or woman of high rank from the distant past, who served her husband and her lord through her wise counsel and compassionate acts. But by the latter part of the early modern era, popular exemplars of filial piety included two young sisters, daughters of a peasant, who swore vengeance on the murderer of their father and ultimately cut down the perpetrator in public with their swords. What happens when devotion to parents compels a daughter to act in ways that defy convention or violate the laws of the state? Why did the nature of exemplary filial piety—and the status of the “exemplars” themselves—change so dramatically over time? Was filial piety for women a principle or a problem? This chapter addresses the questions posed by filial piety as they are revealed in two sets of sources: a corpus of biographies of “exemplary women” published between the mid-seventeenth and early nineteenth century, which were meant to serve as models for contemporary women’s behavior; and diaries and memoirs written by literate women of varying statuses and places of origin dating from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. With regard to the first set of sources, I trace

21

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| Filial Piety

the changes in ideals of filial piety through three collections of biographies of exemplary women, Asai Ryōi’s Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm, 1661), the anonymously authored Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Tales of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm, 1713), and Matsudaira Yorinori’s Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East, 1801). These biographies were intended to function primarily as didactic literature for women. Like most instructional manuals, they most likely were not read by women themselves in the early Tokugawa period, but by the latter part of the era they formed part of a broad range of literature aimed at and read by women. Equally important, the biographies were also meant to be entertaining and therefore were heavily embellished. The second set of sources serve as a touchstone throughout the book. In this chapter I focus on the writings of Inoue Tsūjo (1660–1738), the literary prodigy who left home in her early twenties to serve as tutor to the mother of the lord of her domain; the diaries of Nakayama Suzuko (b. 1675), wife of a daimyo and daughter of a vassal killed in his prime by his own lord; and the many letters that Itō Maki (1797–1862), a commoner woman who assiduously climbed the social ladder to become the wife of a shogunal retainer, or hatamoto, wrote to her parents. These narratives, and others introduced in subsequent chapters, give us insight into women’s lives and thoughts in ways instructional texts do not. Here they show how women and their families acted in accordance with filial principle but also, in doing so, reinvented the concept. As both the discursive and narrative sources in this chapter show, contrary to the common equation of filial piety with passivity and obedience to authority, filial behavior for women was defined by action—namely, action undertaken by women in the service of their families and themselves.

defining filial piety for women: variations across the east asian region At first glance, filial piety (Ch: xiao; J: kō), defined as loyalty and obedience to one’s elders and superiors, seems an unambiguous concept. But when we examine filial piety more closely, we see that complications and contradictions abound, especially regarding the evolution of norms for filial behavior by women. In early modern Japan and throughout East Asia, filial piety stood at the very core of the Confucian values that fundamentally shaped politics, society, and culture. However, like any concept evolving over two millennia, filial piety was not and is not one easily

Filial Piety | 23

definable thing. Even in early Chinese thought, views on the subject diverged, with Confucian thinkers articulating a view of xiao as honoring and obeying one’s ancestors, one’s parents, and one’s lord, while Daoist thinkers emphasized a free-spirited and less ritualistic sense of reverence for elders.1 Liu Xiang’s Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women, ca. 77–76 b.c.e.) has long been acknowledged as the locus classicus of the Confucian view on women’s filiality, elevating the highly idealized “exemplary woman” (lienü) as a model for behavior and comportment.2 At the same time, the Lienü zhuan and many of the texts that followed in its tradition went beyond concerns with gender roles and proper behavior for women and touched on broader issues relating social order to individual morality.3 Equally important was the Daoist-influenced concept of xianyuan (virtuous and talented ladies), learned and free-spirited women who acted on their beliefs and in doing so “transcended the virtues of obedience and submission that the male world had imposed on them.”4 Debates over the nature and practice of filial piety in China continued for generations. Its distinctively reciprocal yet hierarchical nature made filial piety the model for the subject-ruler relationship that undergirded the Chinese imperial system as well as the political systems throughout East Asia. In Korea, for example, the imperial court during the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) subscribed to a rigorously orthodox form of Neo-Confucianism that institutionalized filial piety by legislating ancestor worship and enforcing the principles of patrilineal descent and male primogeniture, but it did so in great part because such practices had not been widely enforced in preceding eras.5 In early modern Japan, although it did not exclusively dominate the ideological field, Neo-Confucian thought flourished under the patronage of the early Tokugawa shoguns; accordingly, scholarly as well as popular texts emphasized the value of filial piety and the importance of the patrilineal family as the embodiment of the social, political, and cosmic order. From the early seventeenth century on, both domainal governments and the shogunate began issuing commendations for filial piety and other “virtuous acts.” On the domainal side, the best-documented case is Okayama, which began issuing commendations for “good deeds” by its people in 1601.6 It was not until 1801, however, in the aftermath of yet another attempt to shore up Confucian values, that the shogunate published the Kankoku kōgiroku (Official Record of Filial Piety), a list of individuals throughout the country who had been commended for filial piety from the founding of the regime to the time of the record’s compilation. The majority of the awards date from after 1680, with a peak

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between 1750 and 1797. The awardees were overwhelmingly male, but women were also commended, the vast majority under the category “filial piety,” followed rather distantly by those commended for “chastity.”7 In contrast to the situation in late imperial China, women in Tokugawa Japan were commended for filial acts toward both natal parents and in-laws. This may have encouraged not only the types of behavior seen in filial piety tales but also, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, the decisions made by women and their families as they considered the marriage, childbearing, and succession options available to them.8

“exemplary women” and the rhetoric of filial piety in early modern japan Norms and ideals of filial behavior for men and women became well established in early modern Japan not only through official policy but also through the dissemination of published texts in the Confucian tradition. Among the most popular texts on filial piety were the collections of biographies of exemplary women (restsujoden) modeled on Liu Xiang’s Han dynasty text. The Japanese texts, like their predecessors, sought to inculcate filial behavior by describing the filial actions of exemplary women from the past and present, with the hope of inspiring women in the present to live and act like them. By examining the changes in the content and structure of the tales themselves over time, we can see how filial piety formed part of a broader public discourse on womanhood, one that evolved with the shifting social and political conditions of the times. The primary way in which official ideals diverged from popular discourse on filial piety can be seen in the Kankoku kōgiroku’s position on violence in the service of filiality. Official policy stated specifically that vendettas were not to be considered filial acts, and individuals would not be commended for executing them. The text relegates vendettas to the Appendix, where they are listed as “extraordinary deeds.” This attitude falls in line with the shogunate’s preference for the rule of law over vertical ties of loyalty, as depicted, for example, in the punishment meted out to the loyal but lawbreaking retainers in Chūshingura.9 By taming the violence of the vendetta while promoting acceptable expressions of filial piety for women, the shogunate tried to temper the emotional excess of otherwise commendable acts of loyalty.10 However, in spite of this prohibition, popular interest in vendettas remained high, revenge plots fueled by filial devotion continued to be represented in popular discourse, and

Filial Piety | 25

the image of the filial child as crusading avenger gained considerable currency in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture. Many of the biographies of exemplary women discussed here were loosely based on actual lives, but some were largely invented, and several of these life stories were retold and reshaped in fiction and drama. The blend of the actual and the imaginary, rather than decreasing the authority of exemplary women tales, lent them narrative power and increased their appeal to a growing popular audience. “Honchō jokan shō” (1661) In 1661 Asai Ryōi (d. 1691), an up-and-coming writer of vernacular literature, published one of the first collections of tales of virtuous women, Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm). Following the Chinese model fairly closely, he grouped short biographical accounts of some twenty-one women into five categories of virtue: wisdom, compassion, righteous principle, chastity, and persuasive skill (bentsū). All of these exemplary figures were women of high status—noblewomen, wives of officials or high-ranking warriors, or, in the case of the last category, women writers of some repute—and all had lived (or in the case of legendary or mythological figures, were said to have lived) in Japan in the fairly distant past. As in classical Chinese exemplar literature, these individuals were not “real” people but composites of ideals, and they were meant to function as models for the behavior of contemporary women. While concerned with the didactic function of their writings, authors of popular fiction like Asai Ryōi also were keenly aware of the need to attract and maintain the reader’s attention. As a result, the tales he recounted do not lack dramatic flair, a touch of the unbelievable, and a healthy dose of the supernatural. “Wise” women, for example, include such figures as Empress Jingu, wife of Emperor Chūai and a legendary sovereign in her own right, whose exploits in the third century c.e. are recorded in Japan’s first written history, the Nihon shoki (Records of Japan, 720 c.e.). According to the Nihon shoki, Empress Jingu’s sage leadership and understanding of the Heavenly Way allowed her to overcome her husband’s poor judgment and guide Japanese military forces to conquer the kingdoms of the Korean peninsula—a victory that was no less satisfying for being entirely fictional. “Compassionate” women include admirable figures such as Empress Kōmyō (ca. 701–60), a devout Buddhist and savior of the impoverished and the sick, who is said to have established a public bathing house at which she herself

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scrubbed the bodies of a thousand poor people. In the ultimate act of compassion, when told by a wandering leper that he would be cured if she sucked the pus from his wounds, the empress willingly did so, whereupon the leper transformed into the bodhisattva of healing, Yakushi Nyōrai, who was liberated by Empress Kōmyō’s actions to care for all beings. Women with “persuasive skills” fill a category grounded in the Lienü zhuan’s model of the value of the learned woman who can reason intelligently and write and speak persuasively. In the Honchō jokan, such women include the great women writers of the Heian period, Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973–ca. 1025) and Izumi Shikibu (ca. 974–?) and the courtesan of Eguchi, whose exchange of verses with the great poet Saigyō (1118–90) caused her to repent, give up her practice of entertaining men, and embark on the path of Buddhist learning.11 In most of the tales, although women’s wisdom and learning are shown to be of great value, it is women’s devotion to their men—husbands, fathers, sons, teachers, mentors—and the sacrifices they make for their benefit that constitute the essence of their virtue. In most of the stories in Honchō jokan, women stop short of suicide or death to demonstrate their filiality. The one exception is Kesa Gozen, a woman of “righteous principle” who gives her life to defend both chastity and loyalty to family.12 As she is presented in Honchō jokan, Kesa Gozen lived in the late Heian period (ca. twelfth century). She was the daughter of the noblewoman Komorogawa, and from girlhood she possessed such extraordinary beauty that she “led onlookers’ hearts astray.”13 At the age of fourteen she married the warrior Minamoto Wataru (dates unknown). One day Wataru’s cousin, a warrior named Endō Moritō, caught a glimpse of Kesa Gozen, and in that moment he became infatuated with her. Driven to extremes by his desire for Kesa Gozen, Endō hatches a plot to threaten the life of Komorogawa, vowing to kill her if Kesa Gozen does not leave Wataru for him. Upon learning of this plot, Kesa Gozen thinks to herself, “One is supposed to be filial to one’s parents above all else. But it is the way of a wife to risk her life for her husband.”14 Caught between the demands of filial duty to her mother and to her husband, Kesa Gozen puts into action a plan of her own: she approaches Endō and pretends to collude with him in the murder of her husband. She tells the smitten man that she will return home that very night, wash her husband’s hair, get him drunk, and put him to bed: “He will be sleeping next to a window, with his pillow placed toward the east. Find his wet hair and cut off his head.”15 However, upon returning home Kesa Gozen wets her own hair and lies down to feign

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sleep next to the window, on the pillow facing east. Endō arrives as planned and kills the sleeping person he believes to be Minamoto Wataru; only upon returning home does he realize he has killed the woman he loves. Overcome by remorse, he informs Wataru of his deed and begs Wataru to kill him as punishment. Wataru, for his part, interprets the occurrences as karmic retribution for his own bad deeds and proposes that he and Endō take Buddhist vows together and become monks. Readers were meant to see that, caught between the two righteous principles of filial piety and chastity or wifely duty, Kesa Gozen expressed the highest virtue in choosing to die in honor of both causes. Her sacrifice enabled the two men who loved her to understand that, as the author Asai Ryōi puts it in the tale’s conclusion, “taking principle seriously and death lightly is the way of humanity.”16 While Kesa Gozen’s story stands out in the collection of biographies in Honchō jokan as the only one that celebrates female self-sacrifice, in contemporary Chinese texts in the lienü tradition female suicide had become the overwhelmingly dominant motif in biographies of exemplary women. However, it was not filial piety but chastity that motivated female self-sacrifice in Chinese tales; over 90 percent of the tales in Ming and Qing collections involved suicide in the name of preserving chastity and the sanctity of the conjugal relationship.17 These differing motives for women’s self-sacrifice highlight the striking divergence in attitudes toward marital and family relations as represented in popular tale literature in early modern Japan and late imperial China. Whereas in the latter it was the conjugal bond that mattered most to women, in the former it was the filial bond that was elemental, and could be breached only by death. “Honchō onna nijūshi kō” (1713) While in Honchō jokan female self-sacrifice was rare, the theme of a woman’s suicide in the name of filial duty to her own parents came to dominate later Japanese collections of exemplary woman tales. In Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Paragons of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm), an anonymously authored text published some fifty years after Asai Ryōi’s Honchō jokan, all but one of the twenty-four accounts focus on women’s filial acts on behalf of their parents.18 In these tales we also see women and girls driven to extreme and direct action in order to ensure the well-being of their parents and families. But while self-sacrifice remains a recurring theme, in most cases the women survive to see the benefits of their filial piety realized, in their

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own time. Also, unlike Kesa Gozen and the exemplary women described in Honchō jokan, over a third of the women whose stories are recorded in Honchō onna nijūshi kō are commoners, several of them poor. This shift perhaps reflects a change in the readership of these tales, perceived or actual, by the early eighteenth century. The stories recorded in Honchō onna nijūshi kō are not organized by theme, as were Honchō jokan and classical Chinese tale collections. Instead they follow a rough chronology, beginning with legendary tales from the distant past and continuing to contemporary times. Several of the stories focus on piety toward mothers. For example, Tokiwa Gozen, wife of Minamoto Yoshitomo and mother of Yoritomo and Yoshitsune, agrees to become the consort of the loathsome Taira Kiyomori (1118–81), the man responsible for her husband’s death and the exile of her sons, only when Kiyomori threatens her mother’s life: “In order to save her mother and help her three sons, [Tokiwa Gozen] expressed mercy and filiality together. On the surface she sacrificed her chastity, but in her heart she did not sacrifice her honor.”19 The most striking tales in Honchō nijūshi kō, however, emphasize a daughter’s loyalty to her father. These tales, unlike those regarding devotion to mothers, are set in the seventeenth century and, notably, feature active and even violent female protagonists. One story concerns the daughter of Sasaki Kanryū. Sasaki was an accomplished swordsman who killed his rival Yoshioka Kenpō in a fight. Unfortunately for Sasaki, Yoshioka’s adopted son was none other than the renowned expert in two-sword fighting Miyamoto Musashi (ca. 1584–1645), author of one of the most widely read treatises on martial arts ever written, The Book of Five Rings (ca. 1645).20 The tale recounts how, in good filial fashion, Miyamoto swore revenge on Sasaki for the death of his father. Sasaki’s daughter, to counter this threat, disguised herself and gained a position as a servant in Miyamoto Musashi’s house, where she hoped to bide her time until she could attack and kill him before he acted on his vow to kill her father. But one day Miyamoto noticed a dagger hidden in the hair of his “servant” and demanded an explanation, at which point the girl broke down and explained her plan to him. Rather than become angry, Miyamoto is moved by her story and tells her, “You have a deeply filial heart and are very brave. But you must listen carefully to this: your father did wrong by killing my father. Because of this, I in turn must kill your father. This expresses filial principle. [But] if we kill each other’s fathers, don’t we fail to emulate Sappō Tenrin?21 We should quickly straighten our hearts, turn away from the sins of our fathers,

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and turn to the aid of the bodhisattvas.” Upon hearing these words, Sasaki’s daughter realizes the error of her ways, cuts her hair, and takes up the way of hosshin bōdai, seeking to awaken her mind and become a bodhisattva.22 The appearance of such a notable figure as Miyamoto Musashi, in a role that undercuts the image of the swaggering swordsman so flagrantly displayed in The Book of Five Rings, almost overshadows the valiant act of Sasaki Kanryū’s loyal daughter. At the same time, Miyamoto seems to draw inspiration from this anonymous girl, whose amateurish and failed attempt at violent retribution only emphasizes the sincerity of her filial devotion to her father. And in contrast to the heavy Confucian influence evident in most filial piety tales, this one seems to follow in the tradition of setsuwa, popular medieval Buddhist tales, in emphasizing the spiritual benefits that can accrue to those who follow Buddhist teachings. Buddhist as well as filial principles also drive the last and perhaps most dramatic story recorded in Honchō nijūshi kō, that of the daughters of a masterless samurai by the name of Okada, living in a place called Akita in Inaba Province. The daughters serve their father “with great filiality.” The problem, however, is that he owns guns and enjoys hunting, which his daughters—here displaying notable precocity, a feature often seen in both Chinese and Japanese female exemplar tales—fear will incur karmic debt and cause him an unfortunate rebirth. They repeatedly plead with him to stop, but to no avail. The girls’ protests eventually become so alarming that the father realizes the depth of their anxiety and gives up hunting. But his resolve lasts only until some people offer to pay him handsomely if he shoots a pair of cranes for them. Upon hearing this proposition, the father “gave in to his old ways.”23 One night, after his daughters fall asleep, he leaves the house armed with his rifle, intending to hunt for cranes. The girls awaken and realize his plan, and they begin to despair. The older sister tells the younger one, “No matter what we say he doesn’t listen. He’s throwing his life away—this is tragic! Tonight, once dark falls, I will put on white robes and go out and stand by the riverside. He’ll think I’m a crane and he’ll shoot me.” As if this plan were not enough, the older daughter then underscores the importance of filiality, by declaring that her act of self-sacrifice “will be proof to father of how much filial principle he has taught us!”24 Not to be outdone in terms of concern for displaying filial principles, however, the younger sister cries out through her tears, “Older sister, you are the one that must carry on the family line, and if you survive, you will express filial piety, so I should be the one to die!”25 In a scene that would be comic were it not so

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tragically earnest, each sister argues that she should be the one to die, and in the end the older sister dons white robes and runs out of the house, pursued by the younger sister, also dressed in white. The two run to the riverside, where they continue to argue over who should have the privilege of sacrificing herself. In the meantime, the father, on the far side of the river, sees the white figures in the darkness and, thinking they are cranes, aims his gun and unerringly strikes the older sister in the chest. The younger sister runs to her fallen sibling’s side and mourns, while the father, not realizing what he has done, “thought it strange that having shot one crane, the other did not fly away,” and readies his gun once more, takes aim, and shoots his younger daughter “upon whom he should have had mercy, thus laying her down on the same pillow [as her sister].”26 The father, pleased at the thought of the profit that shooting the pair of cranes will bring, proceeds to the other side of the river to collect his bounty, but as he clears a path to the riverbank, he is confronted by a horrible sight: instead of fallen cranes, he sees his two dying daughters, mortally wounded by his own gun. In shock, he demands to know what happened, and in their last failing breaths the daughters tell him, “We tried our best, father, to make you stop hunting, but though we kept pleading, it was no use. You must strongly repent for your killing. Take our bodies home and make a funeral pyre. Pray on this and then at the edge of town make a small hut and place in it memorial tablets to us. Then take up the Buddhist life devoutly.” The text concludes with an authorial aside to the reader: “Ah, such filial piety is this! To throw away one’s life in order to effect a better rebirth [for one’s father] is something to be deeply appreciated.”27 The prominence of Buddhist teachings in these stories is notable, but even more compelling is the family dynamic, in particular, what one might call the circulation of filial principle between the daughters and their father. Unlike contemporary Chinese tales of female self-sacrifice in which the point of the sacrifice is to perform filiality in a ritualistic manner that will bring honor to the surviving family members (and, in the case of widow suicide, to the deceased), both Sasaki Kanryū’s daughter and the daughters of the hunter Okada sacrifice themselves in order to repent for their fathers’ immoral acts. In the latter story, the daughters attempt to compel their father to change his sinful ways so that he may enjoy a favorable rebirth—certainly a filial act. And yet the death of his only children seems to ensure the end of his family line, which, the girls are well aware, is the height of impiety. One must ask, who benefits from this tragedy? The father may benefit if he mends his

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ways and follows his daughters’ instructions, but the tale stops short of recounting his behavior after their deaths, and the status of his rebirth would in any case be difficult to predict. It is possible that the daughters would be publicly commended for their piety, but the closing scene seems to imply that their memorializing will be a private affair, accomplished in the hut on the edge of town that they instruct their father to build in their honor, and in any case public acclaim does not seem to be central to their motivations. Okada’s daughters also act in order to demonstrate—not to society at large but to the father himself—the success of his filial teachings. In sum, paradoxically, the culmination of a good father’s teaching comes in the form of the sacrifice of his beloved daughters on his behalf. It is really only the father himself who bears the burden of having directly and indirectly caused his daughters’ deaths, and it is also the father himself who stands to benefit from their filial acts by seeing that it was his wise teachings that led to his daughters’ deep filiality in the first place. Ultimately, the tales are ambiguous, especially as regards the role of the “exemplary woman,” who here seems to combine qualities of deep filiality, decisive action, courage, and unwavering conviction but also stubbornness, emotionality, extreme behavior, and filial impiety (in the sense of terminating their father’s lineage). While their logic as filial piety tales might be convoluted, the stories of the daughter of Sasaki Kanryū and the Okada sisters clearly share a tendency toward high drama in the service of emphasizing filial piety. In the former story, the reader is encouraged to admire the determination of the daughter of the swordsman Sasaki, who attains her goal in spite of her failure to execute her assassination plot against Miyamoto Musashi; in the latter story, the reader mourns the deaths of the two young daughters, senseless but for their possibly beneficial effect on the living. Although the moral message in these tales is open to interpretation, the appeal to emotion is unquestionable. Indeed, the conflict between duty and human feeling echoes a theme prevalent in popular literature and drama at the time and certainly this would have resonated with readers of filial piety tales.28 “Daitō fujo teiretsu ki” (1801) The theme of tragedy leading to the revelation and celebration of filial ideals in an atmosphere of high drama is amplified in Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East), written and published by Matsudaira Yorinori in 1801.29 In this collection, the theme of

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violent retribution enacted by women to honor their family members takes center stage: four of the seven lengthy stories in the collection focus on filial piety to the natal family. Unlike previous collections, all but one of the seven stories are set in the early modern period itself (late sixteenth century and after), thus lending a present-day relevance. This immediacy was underscored by the adaptation of the last tale in the collection for the kabuki and puppet theaters, and as a short story by the popular late eighteenth-century fiction writer Santō Kyōden (1761–1816). Daitō fujo teiretsu ki begins with four shorter stories emphasizing women’s devotion to their husbands.30 The remaining three stories, which are longer and more complicated in plot, forcefully promote the ideas of filial piety to a woman’s or girl’s natal family. To a much greater degree than the stories of the daughters of Sasaki Kanryū and the rōnin Okada described in the earlier Honchō nijūshi kō, these stories sanction violence and even murderous revenge plots as acceptable modes of action through which to express piety. The theme of revenge takes center stage in the fifth and sixth tales in the collection, which are presented as a pair. “The Daughter of Sazaki Kōemon, a Foot Soldier in the Service of the Kyōgoku Lord of Bitchū” and “The Two Daughters of the Peasant Tarō from Sakato Village in Sendai” both involve young women not yet out of their teens planning and executing vendettas in order to avenge the wrongful deaths of their parents. The former story focuses on Riya, the daughter of Sazaki Kōemon, a retainer in Marugame domain, Sanuki Province. Iwabuchi Dennai, a retainer in the service of the same lord, is a drunkard who becomes infatuated with Kōemon’s wife and makes overtures to her, but “maintaining her chastity,” she rebuffs him.31 One night when Kōemon is away, Dennai breaks into Kōemon’s house and attempts to force himself on the wife, who resists him strenuously. Kōemon returns in time to witness the struggle and attempts to kill Dennai, but Dennai kills him instead and then flees. Kōemon’s wife dies from grief shortly thereafter, leaving their only child, three-year-old Riya, an orphan. Kōemon’s wife’s sister and her husband adopt Riya, but they do not inform her of her parents’ fate until she turns thirteen, at which point, in tears, they tell her that her mother often lamented that “if she were a boy, when she came of age she might avenge her father’s death through a vendetta, but because she is a girl, she cannot.”32 The story implies that Riya takes her mother’s words as inspiration, for by the time Riya turns eighteen, she already has decided to avenge her parents’ deaths by killing Iwabuchi Dennai. Shocked by Riya’s plan, her adoptive parents attempt to dis-

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suade her from it. Eventually they recognize that the vendetta is an act of filial piety, and they relent. Riya departs for Edo to search for Dennai. After arriving in the capital she finds a position in service in the house of Nagai Gensuke, a shogunal retainer and an instructor of swordsmanship. She does not immediately disclose her vendetta plans to her employer, but when she does eventually tell Gensuke and his wife about her past, both are deeply moved by her “filial heart,” and Gensuke vows to teach Riya swordsmanship so that she will be able to “attack the enemy easily.”33 Riya practices her swordsmanship dutifully for a full year and then, on Gensuke’s advice, goes into service in the homes of many different shogunal retainers (hatamoto)—according to the tale she served in seventy households in three years—so that she might find out where Dennai is living. Eventually she discovers his whereabouts, and after consulting with Nagai Gensuke, she meets with a shogunal official and acquires official permission to execute her vendetta. The process involves approval not only by the shogunate but also by the Marugame daimyo, in whose domain the killing of Sazaki Kōemon originally took place. Both the shogunate and the local officials agree that Riya should kill Dennai; the daimyo in particular “appreciated Riya’s deeply filial heart.”34 The shogunate decides that the duel between Riya and Dennai should take place at the daimyo’s lower mansion (shimo yashiki), and because Riya’s duel with Dennai represents “an example to all the people of filial womanhood,” the officials declare that every member of the clan, including the women of the inner quarter and even those unrelated to the domain but living in the area, should watch the duel. The swordfight itself is not described in detail, but it takes place in formal circumstances, with a shogunal official attending Riya, who, “with the firm resolution of a woman,” ultimately cuts down Dennai and offers his severed head to the memory of her late father. The tale declares that “there was not a person among the onlookers who was not moved and impressed by Riya’s act,” and she so impressed the daimyo that he offers her the position of ladyin-waiting (tsubone) to his daughter. Eventually, the reader is informed, Riya became the head of the daimyo’s women’s quarters, and renamed herself Nagai in honor of her mentor, the swordmaster Nagai Gensuke. To be sure, Riya’s story stretches the boundaries of credulity, but as we shall see later in the chapter, this unbelievability was perhaps the key to its success as popular lore, as it was told and retold in various forms and with differing details. The tension between reality and invention is perhaps most striking, however, in the sixth tale in Daitō fujo teiretsu ki,

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about Taka and Haru, two young daughters of a Sendai peasant named Yotarō. The plot is quite similar to that of the tale of Riya, but while Riya was almost certainly a fictional creation, the heroines of the Sendai story often are presented as having actually existed.35 As the tale tells it, one day, when the older sister was sixteen years old and the younger thirteen they were out working in the fields with their father when a retainer to the adviser of the daimyo named Shiga Danshichi passed by. A bunch of grass the younger girl tossed in the air accidentally fell on Danshichi, who flew into a rage and, even though Yotarō and the girls apologized profusely, cut down Yotarō with his sword. The girls ran home and told their mother, who was already ill, of their father’s murder; the mother then fell into despair and died. Subsequently, the family’s land was sold and the proceeds turned over to the orphaned daughters, who were put in the custody of their aunt in another village. From there, the girls set out to avenge their parents’ deaths by waging a vendetta against Shiga Danshichi. They inform their aunt that they want to go into service in Fukushima, but from there they go on to Edo, where they search for a teacher of swordsmanship, eventually finding their way to the house of the renowned swordmaster Yui Shōsetsu (1605–51).36 “With tears streaming down their faces,” the sisters ask Shōsetsu to take them in as servants and to teach them martial arts so that they might avenge their father’s death at the hands of Shiga Danshichi. “Moved by the purity of the sisters’ wish,” Shōsetsu puts them in the care of the women of his household. At this time, Shōsetsu also bestowed upon the girls new names: the elder becomes Miyagino and the younger Shinobu. While they live in his household, Shōsetsu teaches Miyagino how to wield the fighting sickle (jingama) and throwing knives (shuriken) and trains Shinobu in using the halberd (naginata). After five years of intense training, Shōsetsu pronounces the girls ready to undertake their vendetta, and with his blessings they journey back to Sendai, where they go straight to Shiroishi Castle, headquarters of Sendai domain. There, as part of a planned ruse, they declare to officials that they wish to be killed by Shiga Danshichi: “With our parents gone, we do not have anything left in this world. Just as our father was killed by Master Danshichi, we would also like to be killed by him.”37 Upon hearing their plea, the daimyo’s adviser realizes immediately that the girls’ true plan is to avenge their parents, and he is “moved by their filiality.” He takes the girls’ appeal to the daimyo, Date Tadamune (1600–58), and Tadamune sanctions a vendetta. The tale describes the duel in great detail, with attention to its formal and ritualized nature. As

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in the case of Riya’s vendetta in Edo, Miyagino and Shinobu’s duel with Danshichi in Shiroishi takes place in an arena marked off by bamboo fences, with both shogunal and domainal officials in attendance. Miyagino and Shinobu enter the battleground dressed in funereal white kimonos, assisted by the three samurai who accompanied them from Yui Shōsetsu’s residence in Edo. Before the duel, Danshichi and the girls are given a ritual meal, shattering the ceramic bowls after they finish eating. At the signal of the drum roll, the battle begins. Shinobu goes first, wielding her naginata; she fights with Danshichi for some time, and both are wounded. After a break in the action, the duel resumes, with Miyagino this time attacking Danshichi with a sickle with a ball of lead attached to it by a chain. Miyagino succeeds in immobilizing Danshichi’s arms with the chain and then calls for Shinobu, who cuts off his arms with the naginata. Miyagino delivers the final blow, severing Danshichi’s head with her sickle. Finally, “the sisters put their palms together and offered the head to their deceased father’s spirit.” The audience—like so many observers of such filial acts—was “very much moved.”38 Their longsought goal attained, Miyagino and Shinobu then attempt to commit ritual suicide, but the officials prevent them from doing so. Instead, they cut their hair and declare that they will become Buddhist nuns and “offer prayers for their deceased parents and Danshichi for the rest of their lives.” The daimyo rewarded the sisters handsomely, posthumously granting their father stipend lands in excess of 100 koku, so that the sisters could support themselves in their religious life. But the sisters’ filial acts did not end with the vendetta, for in 1651 their teacher Yui Shōsetsu committed seppuku in the wake of a botched coup attempt against the bakufu, and his severed head was put on public exhibition. The tale recalls how the sisters—now nuns—surreptitiously stole their master’s head and reinterred it properly at a temple. As in the case of Riya, the tale of Miyagino and Shinobu ends with a just resolution, embodied in the death of the antagonist, the avenging of parents and teacher, and the establishment of the female protagonists in suitable new lives. In both cases, the vendettas are “fixed” from the beginning; it is a foregone conclusion that the daughters will kill the offenders and avenge their parents’ deaths and their families’ honor. And of course in both cases the culmination of the vendetta—the highly ritualized, officially sanctioned, and appropriately violent duel—is an occasion to display to the public the importance of filial piety. The happy endings point to the way in which, by the turn of the century, the simple value of the integrity of the family and the devotion of children to their parents had come to

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stand in for, and perhaps to elide, the complicated and crosscutting loyalties that actually pertained in the public, political world. Filial Piety Tales in Drama and Fiction: “Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi” (1780) and “Musume katakiuchi kokyō no nishiki” (1780) The human drama of the vendetta and its performative potential was not lost on later writers; the story of Miyagino and Shinobu was made into a popular play titled Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi (The Tale of Shiroishi and the Taihei Chronicles), performed in bunraku and kabuki versions, both of which were first produced in Edo in 1780.39 The play became among the most famous of the many that were made on the vendetta theme (katakiuchi or adauchi). Like many fictional works seeking to avoid the shogunate’s ban on representations of “current events” or the affairs of the warrior class, the play is nominally set in the distant past (the Nanboku-chō era, 1336–92; hence the Taiheiki reference), and the plot is significantly altered. At the play’s beginning, Miyagino is a high-ranking courtesan (oiran) in a large brothel in Edo’s licensed pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara, and she is said to be a descendant of Kusunoki Masashige, her father a loyal retainer of the Kusunoki clan who, after the noble death of his lord, fell to the status of rōnin and then of peasant, which was his lowly status at the time of his murder.40 Like many jidaimono, the play is extravagantly anachronistic, since of course neither Edo nor the Yoshiwara existed in the fourteenth century. However, giving Miyagino—a peasant’s daughter in the original tale—a samurai heritage allows the play to exploit her sense of warrior honor, which undergirds and makes logical her later extreme filial behavior. When Shinobu appears, it is as a newly hired servant at Miyagino’s brothel, a country girl with a comically heavy northeastern accent. Only upon the typically hyperdramatic discovery of an amulet she wears, the twin of which is possessed by Miyagino, do the two women realize they are sisters. Miyagino is unaware of the death of their father and is shocked to hear the news from Shinobu that Shiga Danshichi has killed him. In her country patois, rendered in the original in dialect and in this English translation in a rustic, vaguely Appalachian idiom, the stillgrieving Shinobu tells Miyagino about their father’s murder: “Well, the samurai was about ta finish me off as well when our village headman came along. No matter how much ah saw, he says, we hadn’t any real proof o’ the killin’, an’ so there was nothin’ we could do. Pa died . . .

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just like a dog! (Sobs.) Like a pheasant caught by . . . a hawk! We couldn’t get revenge. Ah was so sad an’ miserable.”41 Miyagino, in a state of near collapse from grief, then turns to comfort her sister, saying: I understand what you’re feeling. Yet it was your good fortune to have lived so many years with Mother and Father. . . . When father couldn’t pay the rice tax and was put into prison, I thought only of helping him, and so sold myself into this brothel district. Thinking back, it’s been twelve years already. You were only five, and I hardly knew your face. That I could not be with Father at his death, nor at Mother’s bedside when she passed away, fills me with remorse. . . . I have been unfilial! (She bows and then presses and hand on her chest.) How pitiful this is.42

When she recovers her composure, Miyagino begins to plot revenge. Inspired by the famous Soga monogatari (Soga Tales, ca. 1266), about two brothers who avenge their father’s death, she proposes that they take revenge by killing Danshichi. The brothel proprietor, Sōroku, whom the sisters initially think opposes their plan, actually ends up releasing them from service so that they might realize their vendetta. The puppet theater and kabuki versions of the play conflate the vendetta plot of the sisters with the Yui Shōsetsu incident in order to create a satisfyingly dramatic narrative that was also sufficiently removed (in theory) from actual events of the day to avoid attracting the attention of shogunal censors. Adaptations of the Miyagino-Shinobu story were not limited to the theater, however. In 1780, the same year Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi was first produced, Santō Kyōden wrote a short comic novel (kibyōshi) titled Musume katakiuchi kokyō no nishiki (Hometown Brocade of a Daughter’s Vendetta). In this story, the heroine is Oyoshi, the only daughter of Yoshimizu Sawanosuke. Her enemy is an ashigaru named Tomosuke. Oyoshi, like Miyagino and Shinobu, practices swordsmanship day and night, until her skills “so exceeded those of all the other students that she was held up as an example of accomplishing the impossible through sheer concentration of effort.” In the end, she confronts the evil Tomonosuke, achieves vengeance for her parents, and manages to marry the dashing young son of her swordmaster. As one character comments in the end, “Isn’t this all very fortunate!”43

rethinking exemplarity: filial piety as represented in women’s diaries and memoirs For all that tales of exemplary women and their later dramatic and fictional interpretations tell us about norms, ideals, and aspirations

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regarding filial piety and filial behavior, they are in essence narrative inventions intended to inspire and entertain. As engaging as these tales are, however, they ultimately lead us to question how actual Edo-period women understood their relationships and obligations to their parents, husbands, and siblings. To address this issue, I turn to prose writings by educated women who lived from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. One can see in these memoirs and diaries a high level of awareness of norms of filial duty, largely to the natal family. At the same time, one can also see the many variations in the ways women could, over the course of their lives, fulfill their filial obligations. Inoue Tsūjo (1660–1738) For Inoue Tsūjo, a talented young woman from Marugame domain in Sanuki Province on Shikoku, filial duty took many forms. Tsūjo was born in 1660, the eldest child of Inoue Gizaemon Motokata, a scholarly minded domain official who in his youth had studied in Kyoto with teachers of the Hayashi school. The Inoue were descended from Sengoku daimyo stock: Inoue Motokata was the nephew of Katagiri Katsumoto (1556–1615), one of the five generals appointed to look after the interests of Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori after Hideyoshi’s death. Tsūjo’s mother, Watanabe Ei, was from Harima. Soon after Inoue Motokata and Ei married, they moved to Marugame when the daimyo Kyōgoku Takatomo had his domain transferred there from Harima in 1658. Two years later, Tsūjo was born.44 Like many Edo-period women writers whose works survive today, Tsūjo was recognized early on as a prodigiously gifted child, and her natural talents were encouraged and cultivated by her father. As we will see in chapter 2, Tsūjo imbibed the teachings of her doting scholar father and acquired an impressive understanding of both the Japanese and the Chinese classics by the time she was a teenager. According to a biography written by her son Sanda Yoshikatsu, Tsūjo wrote twelve books on various subjects, from household precepts (kakun) to commentaries on classical poetry, collections of her own poetic compositions, and travel accounts.45 Sadly, however, all but a handful of the texts were lost to fire. The mainstays of her extant oeuvre include the travel accounts Tōkai kikō (Journey to the Eastern Seas, 1681) and Kikka kikō (Journey Home, 1689); an account of her years working in Edo in the daimyo’s residence titled Edo nikki (Edo Diary, 1682–83); a five-volume poetry collection, Ōji shū (Collection of Things Past, 1681–1718); and two short jokunsho (ethical texts

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for women), one written when Tsūjo was only sixteen years old and the other when she was in her early twenties. Some miscellaneous writings and correspondence also survive. Most relevant to a discussion of filial piety are Tsūjo’s remarkable jokunsho. There are few examples of ethical texts written by women, even fewer written by a person so young. Both Tsūjo’s Shojo no fu (Precepts for Young Girls, 1676), written when she was sixteen, and her later work, Shinkei ki (Chronicle of the Inner Chambers, ca. 1681), are redacted in flawless kanbun, and both echo the teachings of the great Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi (1130–1200), extolling the virtues of a woman maintaining her place within the home while also stressing the importance of learning for girls and women.46 Shojo no fu consists of twenty-six short admonitory phrases. They include such declarations as the following: Follow the enlightened teachings of your parents from inside the dark inner [women’s] chambers Take the classics as your teacher and study the Four Virtues, take the family rules as the guiding principle and train yourself to be gentle Mourn the [solitary] cock’s crow heralding the bounty of the day, rejoice in the [mandarin duck] mating happily for life Look at the collected biographies from times past and in your heart act as an exemplary woman ... Look out the window and spin, light the oil lamp and take up the needle ... Gather cloth and heed the teachings of the needle, shun pride and reflect the teachings of women of the past ... Do not allow yourself to venture outside the garden gate, do not allow your words to travel over the transom ... There are not a few women teachers, so we should take up the virtues of the ancients and manifest them today47

Tsūjo’s admonitions about the importance of women remaining in the home and devoting themselves solely to domestic concerns and preparation

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for marriage would not be so remarkable if her own life had conformed to her teachings. But in fact Tsūjo’s life took a different path. In her late teens Tsūjo’s reputation as a poet and scholar had grown, and at twenty-two—when she normally would have been married—she was asked by the Marugame daimyo Kyōgoku Takatoyo to go to Edo to serve as a tutor (jidoku) to his mother, Yōjōin. This position was different from that of a lady-in-waiting or a servant, for being appointed as a teacher was a clear acknowledgment of Tsūjo’s learning and required her to use her literary skills constantly. In order to take up this post, in the twelfth month of 1681 Tsūjo left Marugame for the first time, accompanied by her father and a retinue of servants, and traveled to Edo. This trip occasioned the writing of Tsūjo’s first travel diary, Tōkai kikō, a partial account of her journey to the eastern capital, written in prose liberally interspersed with poetic compositions. Tsūjo lived and served Yōjōin in Edo until the older woman’s death in 1689. After she returned to Marugame and married a local retainer named Sanda Munehisa, Tsūjo wrote a second jokunsho, which she titled Shinkei ki. The term shinkei in the title is an antique word for the women’s chambers within a household, and it expresses Tsūjo’s attitudes to a woman’s place in the home, an appropriate topic considering her recent marriage. She writes: Regarding the way for women: spend your days within the household; do no wrong, and follow righteous principle. Express gentleness and make it a virtue, and be sure to have faith in all your actions. Food, drink, and clothing are not things to be discussed outside [the household]. If you violate [this principle], it is at variance with the Way of Heaven and chaos will surely ensue.48

In other words, women should shun life in public and remain in the home or risk upsetting the natural order of things. Tsūjo then briefly describes the fates of several women, all gleaned from the Chinese classics, who did not follow these rules and caused the downfall of their countries. Remonstrance against such women— “castle topplers” (keisei), as they were called—was a common refrain in instructional texts for women. Taking up this admonition about the dire effects of “bad” women on public life, she concludes the text: When you see this, is it not clear that women are the cause of chaos in governance? I will remain until the end of the day within the home with various excellent works of history and women’s writings to serve as my teachers; those inclined to do differently should take this as a warning. I hope that they mend their errant ways and turn out well. Expressing my wishes while acknowledging my weaknesses, I commit this to writing.49

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Again, as in Shojo no fu, Tsūjo’s praise of a life spent cloistered from the outside world, tending to home and family, stands in contrast to her own journey to Edo to work in the house of another where, as we shall see, she witnessed firsthand significant social and political events of her time and in many ways mediated the communication between her sheltered mistress and the outside world. Still, once married Tsūjo’s life conformed more closely to the model of homebound womanhood she describes in her ethical texts. Tsūjo and her husband, Munehisa, eventually had five children, the youngest of whom was born when Tsūjo was forty-four. Her eldest son and youngest daughter died in childhood, but her youngest son, the aforementioned Sanda Yoshikatsu, editor of Tsūjo’s collected works, and her eldest daughter, Shige, went on to become writers and scholars of some importance. Tsūjo was in many ways an exemplary filial daughter. She was extraordinarily bright, a recognized literary talent, and devoted to her parents. And yet there were many ways in which she was not filial, by conventional standards—even the standards she articulated herself in her jokunsho. She was learned in Chinese, which was usually deemed inappropriate for women, and because of her time in service she spent a long period away from home and family. Also because of her career, she married late. She was still able to have children, and it is a testament to her parenting that her son took it upon himself to preserve her literary legacy. Tsūjo’s life shows that for women accomplishment—even in pursuits that took them away from their parents and families and put at risk their ability to bear children—could be filial. For Tsūjo, nothing could have been a better form of expression of filial devotion than to have her family legacy live on for future generations through her writings. Nakayama Suzuko (b. 1675?) Nakayama Suzuko’s birth and death dates are not certain, but she was probably born around 1675, making her fifteen years younger than Inoue Tsūjo. Her husband, Nakayama Naomichi, was a retainer of the prominent daimyo and nativist scholar Tokugawa Mitsukuni and later a supporter of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi as shogun.50 Suzuko would have remained a footnote, an unnamed spouse in the official genealogy of warrior lineages, had she not written two texts that survive to this day. The first, a travel diary that was given the title Fujii-shi onna no ki (Account of a Woman of the Fujii Clan, ca. 1694) by a later copyist, chronicles a trip to the Nakayama family’s ancestral temple of Nōninji

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to observe the anniversary of the death of Suzuko’s father-in-law, Nakayama Naoharu.51 This trip and Suzuko’s account of it in many ways represent and re-create the filial ties that bound Suzuko to her husband’s family. Suzuko writes that in the spring of 1694, accompanied by her mother-in-law and several others, she left her home in Edo and traveled north to the town of Hannō, in what is now Saitama Prefecture. En route to Nōninji, the group planned to stop at the Chōnenji temple to pay their respects at the grave of Suzuko’s younger brotherin-law, Nobusada, who had died four years earlier at the age of seventeen. As Suzuko departed Edo at daybreak, she wrote, “Our hometown disappears into the mist / as does the endless road on which we travel / the plains of Musashino.”52 As the traveling party began to ascend into the mountains surrounding the temples that are their destination, Suzuko grows anxious. She worries that they will not arrive at Nōninji in time for her father-in-law’s memorial service.53 Her anxiety melds with her feelings of loneliness and isolation in the unfamiliar surroundings and her renewed grief for the dead. As she sleeps fitfully she listens to the unfamiliar sound of the wind soughing in the trees, and she is plagued by dreams that she describes as both surprising and painful. She writes, “If it were not for this sadness I could more fully appreciate the wind in the pines in this mountaintop village.”54 As convention dictated, Suzuko used poetry to convey the sadness and the beauty of the desolate environment. When the group finally arrives at Chōnenji, as they approach Nobusada’s grave Suzuko’s mother-in-law begins to quietly weep, and gradually all in attendance are overcome with sadness; Suzuko writes that “there are no words” to describe the grief of a mother who has lost her young son, and the party stands in silence listening to the wind whistling around them. Having paid their respects, they resume their journey to Nōninji. They arrive without incident, the memorial service is held, and then Suzuko and her party visit Naoharu’s grave site. Again Suzuko’s focus is on her mother-in-law, whose appearance, voice, and presence are described in hushed, magisterial tones as exemplifying the utmost in filial devotion to her late husband. After the services are concluded the party heads home, stopping at places of interest on the way. The roads become more crowded and lively as they get closer to Edo, and finally they arrive home to a joyous welcome from the children of the household. The account ends with a copyist’s note stating that the author is “the daughter of the loyal retainer of the lord [Tokugawa] Mitsukuni of Mito, Fujii Mondayū” and that “it was written during the Hōei era, at

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about the same time as the Matsukage nikki written by the concubine of Yanagisawa Kōshū [Yoshiyasu].” “We should praise this era,” the copyist concludes, “which has produced so many talented women.”55 It is highly debatable whether Suzuko’s brief account of a six-day trip to Hannō compares favorably with Ōgimachi Machiko’s (1679–1724) masterful evocation of life at the shogunal court during the reign of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi.56 Although Suzuko was related to the Yanagisawa through the winding paths of marriage and adoption, she was not the accomplished writer—in terms of talent or reputation—that Machiko was. Debates about literary quality aside, it is Suzuko’s lineage, and its intertwined paths of filial devotion, that is of interest here. For as the copyist’s note explains, Suzuko was not only a wife and daughter-in-law of the Nakayama family, but the daughter of Fujii Mondayū, also a retainer of Tokugawa Mitsukuni, who was assassinated by Mitsukuni in 1694, later in the same year that Suzuko wrote Fujii-shi onna no ki. This event became a sensation of sorts; in retrospect it rivals the hyperdramatic plots of the filial piety tales discussed earlier, and like them, it inspired numerous dramatizations, at least one of which was a kabuki play that continued to be produced well into the Meiji period.57 The causes of the incident remain unclear; all that is known is that Mitsukuni organized a nō performance at the Mito domainal residence in Edo and invited a number of prominent daimyo to attend, and in the middle of the performance he suddenly drew his sword and killed Mondayū. Although Mito officials tried to keep things quiet, rumors abounded— that Mondayū was plotting to overthrow the domain government in Mito, that he was conniving with Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu to foment rebellion within the Mito Tokugawa house, and so on. The only thing that seems clear is that Mondayū somehow deeply offended Mitsukuni, who had no recourse but to kill him in order to preserve his own honor. In spite of the gravity of the incident, Mondayū’s family went largely unpunished. Mondayū’s wife (Suzuko’s mother) and his younger son were sent back to Mito from Edo, and the wife was put under the surveillance of her natal family. Mondayū’s two younger daughters (Suzuko’s younger sisters) were sent for by the widow of Mondayū’s older brother, and both subsequently went into service in Edo and married well. One of Mondayū’s sons became a Buddhist priest, and the youngest son stayed with his mother and sisters in Mito. In the wake of the incident, Suzuko found herself caught in the middle: not only was she married to a retainer of Mitsukuni, who had just killed her father, his own loyal retainer, but it fell to her to supervise her siblings’ moves and

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make sure they were all taken care of, tasks she seems to have accomplished relatively efficiently.58 While the content of Fujii-shi onna no ki revolves entirely around the affairs of the Nakayama, the title it was later given suggests that Suzuko’s historical significance was due not so much to the prominence of her husband’s clan as to the infamous history of her natal family, the Fujii. The nineteenth-century copyist’s note suggests that it was Suzuko’s status as Fujii Mondayū’s daughter, as much as her talent as a writer, that justified the inclusion of her short travel account in a late Edo-period collection of exemplary Japanese prose (wabun).59 In this way, Suzuko’s travel diary became—after the fact and unintentionally—a memorial to the untimely death of her father. Judging from her later writings, this was a development she would have supported wholeheartedly. In her lifetime, however, what we know of Suzuko through her own writings and those of her family members suggests that her identity and her filial loyalty were primarily centered on her husband’s family, the Nakayama. And ironically, no sooner had Suzuko settled affairs in the wake of her father’s assassination than her husband of six years, Naomichi, suddenly took ill and died in the second month of 1700. He was only in his late thirties, and upon his death Suzuko became a young widow with no father or other male patron to ensure her welfare. So it was that the day after her husband’s funeral Suzuko and her mother-inlaw moved in with the family of Naomichi’s younger brother, Kuroda Naokuni, who had become a Kuroda through his adoption by his maternal grandparents. This move, which marked a major transition in her life, was perhaps the reason that Suzuko began writing an account of her early widowhood, later titled simply Suzuko nikki (Suzuko’s Diary, 1703–4). The text is infused with sadness at the passing of both time and people who are dear to her and begins with a recounting of the changes in her life in the previous decade: her marriage to Naomichi; her father’s death “in the service of the country,” as she puts it; Naomichi’s death; her move to the Kuroda mansion thereafter; and her loneliness for her mother, confined in Mito after the death of her father. As she remarks, “In the last two or three years we have moved frequently. It has been exhausting, but we have gotten through it.”60 Here she is referring to her move in 1694 to Naokuni’s house after her husband’s death, then again in 1700 to her older brother-in-law Naoyoshi’s house in order to avoid a taboo, then once more in 1701, when she went to live with her newly adopted adult son, Naomasa, a descendant of the Mito Nakayama. The

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move in 1701 separated her from her mother-in-law, with whom she had been living in Naoyoshi’s residence and to whom she was extremely (and atypically) close. Soon after this move came another major disappointment: Naomasa’s biological father had arranged a meeting between Suzuko and her mother in Mito, which she was anticipating greatly, but her mother died just before they were supposed to meet. This event and her reflections on it conclude the diary. In her later life, judging from what can be gleaned from her sister-inlaw Kuroda Tosako’s diaries, Suzuko became a devout Buddhist.61 At some point Suzuko must have moved from where she was staying with Naomasa to the Kuroda upper residence in Tokiwabashi, because we know Suzuko and her mother-in-law fled the Tokiwabashi mansion during a fire in 1717. In 1718 Jikkōin died, but Suzuko remained in Ishihara until she had to flee from floods to the family’s middle residence (nakayashiki) in Mejirodai in 1742. Thereafter, Suzuko’s trips to tend the family graves and to visit her younger brother (who was priest at Chōnenji) are recorded by Tosako. The last record of Suzuko is in Tosako’s memoir Koto no hagusa in 1753. It is a portrait of a lonely and pious woman nearing her eighties. Suzuko is not buried in Nōninji like her husband, her brotherin-law, and her sister-in-law. The location of her grave is not known. The only records of her existence are the two texts discussed above. It seems natural to see Suzuko as a paradigm of wifely devotion and filial duty to in-laws. Her diaries evince a thoroughgoing dedication to Nakayama family members and their legacies. She remained a “chaste widow” in the home of her late husband’s family, even though remarriage for women of her age and status was common in the eighteenth century.62 In her diaries Suzuko also deliberately makes note of the sacrifices she endured to be the ideal filial daughter-in-law: separation from her mother, overcoming the stigma attached to her father’s death, and undertaking the frequent moves among the Nakayama residences, as befit the needs of other family members whose status exceeded her own. While Suzuko’s story lacks the flamboyant (and likely embellished) drama of exemplary women’s tales, we might see in her quiet devotion to her beleaguered natal family an assertion of a sense of filial piety that embraced her own and her husband’s families. Itō Maki (1797–1862) Inoue Tsūjo and Nakayama Suzuko were both born into the samurai class, and it is tempting to attribute their consciousness of both their

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natal and married lineages to this status. But in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century we also see women of commoner birth fashioning their own forms of filial piety in order to actively shape their own and their families’ lives and legacies. Like Tsūjo and Suzuko before her, Itō Maki used writing to display filial devotion to her natal family, but in her case this took an epistolary form. Almost everything we know about Maki comes from a recently discovered cache of twenty-two letters written by her to her natal family between 1832 and 1858. In addition, there survives one letter from Maki’s eldest daughter, Nao, and five from her younger daughter, Tama.63 Maki was the daughter of Kobayashi Reisuke, a prominent physician in Mimasaka Province (presentday Okayama Prefecture). Although her father was of commoner status, he served Izushi Domain (in present-day Hyogo Prefecture), and he was part of a broad intellectual network of physicians and students of Western science that included such pioneering figures as Sugita Genpaku, the first person to dissect a human cadaver in Japan.64 Maki was the eldest daughter and received a good education under her father’s supervision. The Kobayashi were not fortunate when it came to heirs. This fact deeply influenced Maki’s life, especially her attitudes toward her parents and her filial attachment to them. Maki was one of four siblings: she had an older brother named Tetsuzō, a younger sister named O-Noe, and a younger brother named Kyōzō (see chart 1). Tetsuzō died at the age of twenty-five, making Kyōzō the family heir. Kyōzō was well educated in medicine as well as the fine and martial arts, but at the age of twenty-five he fell victim to mental illness and died at thirty-nine, sequestered in the family home, without ever having fully recovered. After Kyōzō’s death, Fukuda Gunsuke, O-Noe’s husband, was adopted as heir, and his and O-Noe’s son eventually inherited the family heirship. In fact, because of Kyōzō’s long illness, Gunsuke had for some years before the former’s death acted as de facto family head. Before her older brother Kyōzō’s death, Maki was adopted by her uncle Kōzaemon, her father’s childless older brother, and his wife, and she moved from Mimasaka to join her uncle/adoptive father in Edo. Kōzaemon, by dint of his industriousness and skillful cultivation of political connections, had acquired hatamoto status. By becoming his adopted daughter, Maki benefited from her uncle’s standing, eventually marrying into not one but two hatamoto houses (her first husband died young, and she remarried) and bearing four children. Although Maki became thoroughly involved in managing the households into which she married and absorbed by the task of raising her children and seeing to

Filial Piety | 47 Kobayashi Shintaro¯ d. 1815, age 87 Tsu¯ (d. 1803)

Nana d. 1811, age 77

Kobayashi Ko¯ zaemon

Kise

Kobayashi Reisuke

(d. 1830, age 66)

(d. 1825)

(d. 1851, age 83)

Daughter of Kimura Heizaemon d. 1861, age 87

Ishi d. 1803

Daughter of Ide Kyu¯ dayu¯

Tetsuzo¯ (d. 1816, age 25)

Onoe

Gunsuke

Kyo¯zo¯

(d. 1859)

ad. Kobayashi

(d. 1842, age 39)

Binnosuke So¯suke

(d. 1816, age 13)

Bunkichi

O-nobu ad. by Hiramura

Jiro¯

Sei’ichi Daughter

Daughter of Matsuyama Juken (d. 1837, age 6)

Fukutaro¯ Nakamura So¯hei

Kobayashi (Sugiura) Tamesaku ad. by Ko¯zaemon (d. 1823, age 33)

Hashimoto Zenji m. to Nao c. 1834, divorced 1835

Maki

Ito¯ (Doi) Kaname

ad. 1813 by Kobayashi Ko¯zaemon ad. c. 1829 by Nakamura So¯hei (d. 1862, age 66)

ad. from Doi to Ito¯ (d. 1864)

Nao (1818–1836) ad. by Ito¯ Kaname

Yamamuro Watanabe Gentayu¯

Heikichi ad. from Wakabayashi as husband to Tama, heir to Ito¯ Kaname in c. 1836

Yamamuro Seigoro¯ (b. 1820) informally ad. by Watanabe as ireko, then formally ad. by Yamamuro Kanzo¯

Utako

Ryo¯suke

Tama (1831–58)

Yo¯hara Kinnojo¯ Kannojo¯ (b. 1836)

daughter

Daughter of Baba Heizo¯

Yoshiaki

Seisuke

chart 1. Family of Itō Maki (adapted from Mega Atsuko, Buke ni totsuida josei no tegami, p. 20).

their successful transitions into adulthood, she never allowed her ties to her natal family, or her filial duty to them, to languish. She remained deeply concerned about her brother Kyōzō’s illness and how it endangered succession to the headship of the Kobayashi house. She worried constantly about the family as Kyōzō’s psychological condition worsened and it became necessary to confine him to the house. She lamented frequently that she could be of little help to her parents, because she lived far from them in Edo and, moreover, because she was “only a woman.” Paradoxically, it was precisely Maki’s status as a distant daughter that ensured her family’s legacy. This occurred in two ways. The first was her ability to improve her family’s reputation—if in subtle and indirect ways—through her own strategic marriage, remarriage, and adoption (examined in detail in chapters 3 and 5). The second, and perhaps

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more important, way was the vehicle of Maki’s filial devotion: the many letters she wrote to her parents over a period of twenty-five years. In them Maki describes in detail the challenges of being wife and mother in a hatamoto family of low rank and correspondingly meager income; the information is unusually direct and revealing of daily life in this stratum of Tokugawa society. In terms of assessing filial piety, the important connection to her parents that Maki sustains over the years via her letters is remarkable and, like Nakayama Suzuko’s diaries, exemplifies the emotional valence of filial devotion. For example, an 1849 letter by Maki to her parents tells of her joy at looking at a map of Okamura, her hometown, that has been sent to her: “I feel as though it’s just like going home.” She longs for Okamura, and upon hearing news of old friends declares that she wants to write and get in touch with them. Even more surprising is the way Maki encourages similar feelings in her children, who have never met their grandparents. There are, for example, five letters from Maki’s younger daughter, Tama, to her Kobayashi grandparents. In a long missive from 1833, Tama writes of how much Maki talks about the Kobayashis and her hometown, and this makes Tama want to meet them very badly. “But because I am a woman and it is a long trip, I can’t go,” she writes. She even says she wants to move to be near them, but her father’s job will not allow it. She says, touchingly, that she wants to become a bird and fly over their home so that she can at least lay eyes on them.65 Both the letter and its contents are evidence of how much and how lovingly Maki spoke of her parents and her home despite the distance that separated them. Filial duty, for Maki, lay not only in maintaining emotional ties across time and space but also in working assiduously to achieve her own and her family’s success by inching up the always slippery social and economic ladder in the late Tokugawa period.

conclusion The divergence between official policy and popular discourse as well as the contradictions evident in women’s personal lives cause us to question what exactly constituted normative behavior when it came to filial piety. Based on the sources examined in this chapter, simple schemes of linear development clearly do not suffice, for filial piety did not steadily grow more restrictive or more lax between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth century. Neither can we identify distinct patterns of filiality according to class or status, for although enforcement of filial

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obligations and principles tended to be more rigorous in the samurai class, values of female sacrifice and daughterly duty were disseminated widely and were generally consistent across status groups. Regional differences in filial piety discourse may have existed, but they have yet to be systematically studied. Okayama Domain, for example, seems to have rigorously monitored family structure and women’s behavior from the early Tokugawa period on, but this does not appear to have been part of a regional phenomenon.66 The elusiveness of clear trends and patterns suggests that we are asking the wrong question. The term normative filial behavior itself suggests both a singular definition of filial piety and a unidirectional implementation of its principles. An examination of the sources in this chapter, however, shows that filial piety was neither uniform nor authoritatively imposed. Certainly, the values espoused in biographies of exemplary women and those embraced by women writers like Inoue Tsūjo and Nakayama Suzuko were similar in general ways, but they differed considerably in their particular forms of expression. Tsūjo, for example, wrote in her ethical treatises that women belonged in the home, but she left hers for over a decade to work and live independent of her family. Suzuko publicly conducted filial rituals for her husband’s relatives while privately mourning the inglorious extinction of her own family. The filial daughters in exemplary women’s tales did not passively accept their families’ fates but took direct action to right wrongs done to family members and rehabilitate their reputations. And the deeds of many of these women, real and fictional, became the stuff of public discussion. Popular vendetta tales competed with hearsay and rumor, and filial daughters and wives became the subject of public acclaim. In short, filial piety was made and remade on the ground, in the streets, bookstores, and theaters, within families, and according to circumstances. Women as well as men took direct action to satisfy personal or familial interests in the name of filial piety, sometimes conforming to established norms, sometimes not. Debates about the existence of selfhood or subjectivity are not entirely relevant in this context, for early modern women were wholly imbricated in the lives of their families. Filial piety is thus a useful conceptual position from which to study their thoughts and actions. Indeed, the context of family made women’s actions—which otherwise might be seen as unacceptable—both appropriate and praiseworthy, for the family’s success could be the product of a wife’s or daughter’s success, and vice versa. In this light, any action taken to further the family’s success, to preserve its reputation, or, indeed, to preserve its existence was by

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definition filial and therefore laudable. In terms of power and influence, Tokugawa women typically have been seen as losers, as victims of patriarchy. But just as the heroines of exemplary women’s tales sacrificed themselves yet survived and even benefited from their experiences, women like Itō Maki, who were able to take action to help their families survive and prosper, were by definition winners.

chapter 2

Self-Cultivation

The Onna Imagawa (Imagawa-Style Admonitions for Women), first published in 1687 and reprinted over two hundred times up to and through the Meiji era, consists almost entirely of a list of injunctions regarding proper behavior and attitudes for women and girls.1 It reads: things about which one should be cautious: a list of essential teachings •

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One’s natural inclinations are distorted; the way of women is never clear; Young women should not make irrelevant pilgrimages to shrines and temples simply for enjoyment; Failing to right even the slightest wrong will lead to bitterness and estrangement from others; [Do not] disregard important things and talk indiscreetly to people; [Do not] forget to deeply honor one’s parents or neglect the path of filial duty; [Do not] scorn or make light of one’s husband and flaunt oneself, for this disregards the way of heaven; [Do not] turn your back on the proper way in order to covet and pursue profit; [Do not] disparage or think inferior people who follow the proper way; [Beware of] those who play around a lot; those who are surrounded by flatterers; those who are always watching others; [Beware of] those who are quick-tempered; those who are jealous; those who are not embarrassed to ridicule others; 51

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[Do not] go astray trying to ape womanly virtues, nor be overly judgmental and disparage others; [Do not] involve yourself with the intrigues of others, nor rejoice in others’ suffering; [Do not] dress and adorn yourself beautifully and then eat in a slovenly manner; [Do not] be ignorant of the ways of others, both lofty and base, while indulging yourself; [Do not] scorn others for their shortcomings while flaunting your own knowledge; [Do not] address monks or nuns directly, nor approach them; [Do not] fail to understand your place [in society], neither overindulging nor going without; [Do not] fail to discern between good and bad servants, nor fail to correct [their behavior]; [Do not] treat your parents-in-law poorly, or you will earn the scorn of others; [Do not] neglect your stepchildren, then ignore the criticism of others; With regard to men, if you even briefly draw closer [to them], it is overly intimate; [Do not] shun those who behave properly while adoring those friends who fawn over you; When people visit, it is rude to reveal your bad humor or take your annoyance out on them.2

Sawada Kichi (dates unknown), the female author of this version of Onna Imagawa, published in 1700, was not unusual in choosing a declarative style. Unlike the dramatic narratives characteristic of filial piety tales, most instructional manuals offered unembellished statements about what a good woman should do, feel, and say. They strike the modern reader as a curious blend of vague moralizing and exacting specificity regarding actions and behaviors. A similar style is evident in Namura Jōhaku’s encyclopedic text, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasure for Women), of 1694. the things that women need to be cautious about ( tashinamubeki koto ) are described briefly below. • • • •

Being filial to their parents Being unfilial to their mothers-in-law Being respectful to their husbands Despising their stepchildren

Self-Cultivation | 53 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Being lustful Being jealous Talking too much Having relations with men Drinking too much Eating too much Smoking tobacco Singing kouta (popular songs) Being stingy with food Being fond of the theater Sleeping late in the morning Wanting things Being miserly Being covetous Spreading rumors about people Being wordy Getting angry Sulking Speaking ill of people Putting on airs Putting on a happy face Plucking their eyebrows Showing off

The moralistic voice is familiar, especially to readers acquainted with the finger-wagging of the oft-quoted Onna daigaku (Greater Learning for Women), published in the early eighteenth century; and the didactic overtones recall the filial piety tales discussed in the previous chapter.3 But these instructions strike us as odd and idiosyncratic. In what sort of intellectual world do plucking eyebrows, not singing kouta, and being respectful to mothers-in-law fall into the same category of behavior? What is the main message this text seeks to convey? Answering these questions requires an exploration of self-cultivation, the principle that unites the disparate types of behavior about which women “should be cautious.” In Confucian-influenced societies, selfcultivation was the root of all virtue, and yet a singular definition of self-cultivation remains as elusive as it was important. In general terms, self-cultivation meant a conscious and deliberate attempt by an individual to nurture within himself or herself recognized virtues such as filiality, obedience, compassion, devotion to learning, diligence, orderliness,

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and attentiveness to others. It was a practice deemed important for both men and women. Confucius is said to have spoken of moral selfcultivation as a process rather than a thing, discussing it in terms of the tension between ren (J: jin, humanity or humaneness) and li (J: ri, principle) and declaring it the central endeavor of all humankind. Likewise, Mencius wrote of nurturing or “growing” the seeds of goodness inherent in all people.4 Early modern Japanese Confucian and Neo-Confucian scholars and writers also used these terms; for Kaibara Ekiken, who was very concerned with women’s roles in society, self-cultivation meant the moral and spiritual encouragement of humane behavior.5 In instructional manuals and other popular published texts for women, however, self-cultivation was more often discussed in terms of shaping or nurturing the human being physiologically as well as psychologically. Terms such as hito zukuri (lit., “making the person”) and yōjō (care of the self) appear frequently.6 Other terms, such as mi wo mamoru (maintaining or protecting the self/body), also appear in these texts with regard to the preservation of physical well-being, especially reproductive health and fertility. And instructional texts also speak of self-cultivation in terms of things women should know (shirubeki koto), things they should be cautious about or avoid (tashinamubeki koto), and skills they should acquire. Whatever the terminology, it is clear that self-cultivation involved the active development of both moral values and practical skills, and women were meant to accomplish it through the conscientious expenditure of time and effort. Further, it depended on individual initiative, which, if applied conscientiously, could result in measurable self-improvement. In other words, no woman’s (or person’s) character was preordained, and change for the better was attainable for those willing to work for it. Indeed, one could argue that it was the sustained concentration of effort itself that enabled self-cultivation, in whatever forms it ultimately took. At the same time, for women as for men, self-cultivation not only concerned the self; it was a social process to be undertaken so that the individual could become a fully contributing member of society. In contrast to an individualistic way of thinking that would see self-cultivation as essentially self-centered, in the early modern Japanese cultural context cultivating the self enhanced the ties between individual, family, and community. In this way, like the principle of filial piety, the practice of self-cultivation elides simple distinctions between self and society, private and public; in its most ideal sense, it radiated out from the individual to affect all of society. When applied to women, it stands in

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contrast to the authoritative inculcation of the “good wife, wise mother” ideal of the modern (post-Meiji) era; the Tokugawa state, unlike its Meiji successor, established few legal parameters on women’s behavior and was neither assiduous nor consistent in policing deviations from gender norms, positing instead that women ought to be good and wise because people in general ought to be so. Morals guides and instructional texts for women were among the main vehicles for teaching about self-cultivation. In the early Tokugawa period, such texts were intended for parents, so that they might instruct their daughters well. By the late Tokugawa period, however, the texts were aimed at women readers themselves. In a social and political world in which a man’s aspirations for self-improvement tended to be circumscribed by his status—a combination of heredity, occupation, and public standing—for women self-improvement was a relatively fluid and self-sustained process, undertaken throughout a lifetime, that could in some cases enable women to blur if not transgress status boundaries. The knowledge, skills, and habits of mind a woman acquired through the various forms of self-cultivation ultimately broadened her consciousness of herself and opened up possibilities for activities outside of as well as within the household. This chapter begins by describing how self-cultivation is discussed in instructional manuals and morals guides and then turns to an examination of key aspects of the process of selfcultivation: reading and writing, sewing, speech, beauty and appearance, and arts and cultural attainments. It concludes by considering how self-cultivation is revealed in writings by and about women, looking specifically at the cases of Inoue Tsūjo in the late seventeenth century, whose literary achievements opened avenues for employment and achievement at a young age, and Sekiguchi Chie, the educated daughter of a wealthy village headman whose competence and connections gained her a place as lady-in-waiting in the shogun’s women’s quarters at the turn of the nineteenth century. Throughout, the sources reveal a thoroughgoing emphasis on active engagement by women in the process of their own self-cultivation.

self-cultivation in instructional manuals: general principles Early modern instructional and didactic texts for women addressed selfcultivation in abstract as well as specific terms. Many authors began with general statements that might be thought of as moral imperatives

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for self-cultivation. In a message that was often repeated in later instructional texts for women, Onna shikimoku (Rules for Women), first published in the Kan’ei era (1624–44) and reprinted numerous times throughout the Tokugawa period, emphasizes that for women education was a lifelong process: “More so than boys, girls must continue to learn throughout their lives.” Unlike many similar texts, Onna shikimoku breaks down ideals for women’s behavior by status. For women of high rank, it advises, “Ladies should be extremely generous, lovely in appearance, and above all, honest. [From the highest] to the lowest, they should exude compassion and benevolence.” It also suggests that women of rank should not “play too much at things like flower viewing in spring or moon viewing in autumn.” Nor should they worry overmuch about Buddhist ideas of salvation and the way: “The heart naturally accumulates desire. The best way to deal with this is by thrice following (sanjū): following one’s parents, one’s husband, and one’s son. If one practices thrice following, one’s house will be in order.”7 For women of the merchant class, Onna shikimoku advises that “no matter how rich or poor one’s family is, a merchant’s wife should never be wasteful. She should be compassionate to those below her and hold mercy and benevolence in her heart. She should not exceed her place in life, nor should she be proud. She should be hospitable to her husband’s good friends, even those she doesn’t like. She should not chatter away noisily; she should just say a few [well-considered] things. Women must learn many things, especially how to speak gently and properly.”8 It is worth noting here that the Onna shikimoku does not set absolute status boundaries for women’s behavior. It does not claim, for example, that elite women should engage in certain activities and not others. Rather, it acknowledges social differentiation based on behavior and stresses that no woman should neglect the opportunity to refine herself. Certainly there was a status-conscious dimension to this, for the female virtues of restraint and gentle nature were often linked to elite standing, but over time virtues historically coded as “elite” were posited as a standard of achievement for women of all classes. In place of behaviors defined strictly by status, many instructional texts encouraged women to calibrate their behavior to their immediate social environment. With regard to gender relations, instructional texts advised women to respect the concept of “thrice following” in relations with their husbands and families. According to the version of the Onna Imagawa published in 1700, “You should be vigilant of all things and follow the

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wishes of your husband. The man [embodies] brightness, and is thus strong; this is the male way. Earth is shadowy and soft; this is the female way. Shadow follows light, and because this is the logic of heaven, earth, and nature, if husbands and wives follow the example of heaven and earth and one honors the other, then they will be following the way of heaven and earth. From the time you are young, make your heart gentle and surround yourself with upright friends. If you falter, do not fall in with bad company.”9 As Dorothy Ko has argued, this way of construing followership for women is hierarchical but also essentially complementary.10 Much like the model of companionate marriage, it does not completely subordinate women to men’s authority so much as it posits that women and men, integrally related like shadow and light, are both followers of “the way of heaven and earth” and should honor one another in a relationship of mutual dependence. Kaibara Ekiken also conceived of followership for women in this way, for he was much less insistent on establishing gender-based hierarchies than is generally acknowledged. In “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō,” Ekiken addressed himself to parents, whom he held responsible for raising their daughters properly: “Girls are brought up to learn entirely from their parents’ teachings. Boys go out [into the world] to follow teachers, learn things, mix with friends, and observe the proper rules and rituals in society. . . . Girls stay primarily in the home, and since they don’t go out, they don’t learn from teachers or friends and don’t observe the rules and rituals of society. For the most part they learn by taking their parents’ teachings to heart; they should not neglect to do this. Without the teachings of her parents, a girl will not know the proper rules and rituals.”11 He urged parents to inculcate in their daughters the “womanly virtues” (jotoku) and to teach them the “Four Behaviors” (shikō), which he described as follows: There are four [proper] behaviors for women: first is women’s virtue; second is women’s words; third is women’s appearance; fourth is women’s skills. These are the four talents a woman needs in order to do the things she needs to do. “Women’s virtue” means to have a good heart—to be honest, neat, gentle, and obedient. This is virtue. “Women’s words” means using proper language. It means not to lie, to choose words carefully and not to imitate others in using bad language. [It means] to speak only when necessary and not to say irrelevant things, and not to criticize what others say. “Women’s appearance” means to look good. Do not overdo the ornamentation; be ladylike, not masculine. One’s disposition should be bright, one’s person should be clean and well maintained, and one’s clothing should be neat. This constitutes a woman’s appearance. “Women’s skills” means the things a

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woman needs to know to perform her duties. Sewing, spinning, making clothes—these are the skills all women absolutely must have. Playing around and laughing are frowned upon. Preparing food and drink with care and serving them to in-laws, husbands, and close friends—these are all women’s skills.12

While Ekiken constructs the “Four Behaviors” as gender-specific, with the exception of sewing and spinning and looking “ladylike” they consist of values that could and did apply to men as well as women. None of them imply absolute subordination of women to men, for even obedience was a virtue for all people living in a hierarchical society. Ekiken’s view of humanity as a whole is essentially Mencian, in the sense that he assumes moral goodness to be a given. In “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō” Ekiken emphasizes that women have an “innate [good] character” that can only be spoiled by parental indulgence. While women ought to know their place in household and in society, Ekiken did not believe they should be passive—they had jobs and responsibilities for which they must be well prepared—and he echoed the formulation of other writers of instructional manuals when he stated, “Men govern the outer realm, women govern the inner realm.”13 Although this statement can be read as a call to confine women to the home, in the context of instructional manuals it meant that men and women had spheres of influence and responsibility that were mutually supportive. Ekiken was clear that in addition to performing household work such as sewing and weaving, women had to be able to read and write in order to properly maintain the household. Women’s governance of the “inner realm” enabled men to pursue their careers or occupations outside the home, but women’s actions also, ideally, maintained a well-regulated household, the nucleus of a well-regulated society. “Inner” life was thus thoroughly imbricated in the “outer” world, not subordinated to it. One of the few women authors of instructional texts, Naruse Isako, adopted a viewpoint very similar to Ekiken’s. In her early eighteenthcentury guide for women, Kara nishiki (A Chinese Brocade), for example, she focuses on the human condition rather than on women’s issues alone. And she too emphasizes thrice following but does not portray women as weak.14 For Isako, as for Ekiken, the responsibilities of women were many, and thus it was important that they make educated choices that benefitted themselves and their families. In other words, self-sufficiency and self-direction were the goals of self-cultivation. These texts also show us that the value of education far exceeded its utilitarian function. Certainly literacy was necessary for many occupa-

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tions, and learned, skilled women had more opportunities for employment, marriage, and social advancement. But at the same time selfcultivation possessed inherent moral and ethical value; instructional manuals worked to propagate these abstract ideals among their readers while at the same time teaching them concrete skills and practices.

studying and learning as self-cultivation Because women played such important roles in maintaining the inner realm of the household, instructional texts viewed women’s education as a principal component of self-cultivation. Education was the single best way to cultivate a woman’s inner character and also augment the practical skills she would need in daily life. But while instructional texts invariably posited the importance of learning, they also emphasized that a woman should not be so educated that she neglects her daily household duties, nor should she flaunt her learning in front of others or scorn those who are less refined. Given these parameters, what exactly should women know, and how should they acquire that knowledge? To address this question, we must make a distinction between the two principal, overlapping modes of knowledge acquisition: study (benkyō) and learning (manabu or gaku, or narau or shū). The former included instruction in reading and writing and the study and interpretation of canonical texts; the latter also included literacy-based skills but was a broader category, embracing practical household skills and cultivated pursuits such as incense appreciation (o-kō), flower arranging, or performing the tea ceremony. On balance, study—from texts, often guided by a teacher, sometimes in a school—was a core value and, increasingly, a necessity for women as well as men in the Tokugawa period. Learning, on the other hand, tended to be accomplished in the home or in informal settings, sometimes with the aid of texts and teachers (usually family members, often women) and sometimes on one’s own. Crucially, it was learning that received most attention in instructional texts and other writings for women. While the formal aspects of a woman’s education were by no means neglected, instructional texts tended to emphasize informal learning or self-instruction within the home, focusing more on the myriad skills useful to women in the context of a household-based economy. From a practical viewpoint, in both study and learning texts were only one tool for knowledge acquisition, and in the case of the most important aspects of an individual’s education the intervention of flesh-and-blood teachers was necessary to

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complete the educational process. For instance, as we shall see in the case of Sekiguchi Chie, for women from wealthy commoner families self-cultivation took the form of formal education and informal training at home followed by service in households of rank, which were essentially finishing schools rather than employers. Study: Reading and Writing The ideals espoused for women’s schooling in instructional texts were based on the Chinese classical model. Despite its tendency to enforce male-dominant norms, this model dictated that young boys and girls should be educated together, with similar curricula, until about the age of seven. As the Onna shikimoku declares, “At first, because neither know anything, girls and boys should be taught the same things. First they learn by watching people, then after that move to training the mind and learning language.”15 Kaibara Ekiken advocated that both girls and boys learn kana and kanji, “counting phrases,” and the Chinese classics (notably the Classic of Filial Piety and the Analects of Confucius). Women should also read the Precepts for Women so that they learn “filial piety, orderliness, honesty, and purity.” He advised against anything vaguely resembling erotica, including Ise monogatari and Genji monogatari, though he considered the latter works “elegant in literary style.” Also to be avoided were “lewd entertainments” such as popular songs (kouta and jōruri) and shamisen.16 In the early years of a child’s education, it was the parent’s—usually the mother’s—duty to arrange appropriate educational opportunities, no matter what sacrifices might be needed on her own or the household’s part. Many early modern instructional texts for women offer the famous anecdote about Mencius’s mother, who moved house three times in order for her son to benefit from the teachings of different types of people in various occupations and locales. The Onna shikimoku declares: “If you act like [Mencius’s mother], your name will carry on through countless generations. You will become a model for all people.”17 While motherly sacrifice for a child’s education was held up as an ideal, it was equally often said that women were prone to loving their children too much and spoiling them as a result. As Kaibara Ekiken wrote in Wazoku dōjikun, “[A mother] loves the child too much and indulges the child’s whims and desires. By doing this, trouble will certainly follow. From a young age, bring your attention to this and do not tolerate selfishness. Too much love makes a child arrogant and will only lead to difficulty for him.”18

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Although elite women of the samurai or courtier classes were more likely to have their educations supplemented by tutors or teachers from outside the home, many women were taught primarily at home, by family members. Naruse Isako, author of the instructional text Kara nishiki, was taught classical Japanese by her grandmother, who had polished her literary skills while serving in a daimyo residence during her youth.19 Other women, like Inoue Tsūjo and Sekiguchi Chie, were educated by their fathers, along with their male siblings. By the later Tokugawa period, women and girls might also attend one or more of several public educational establishments: temple schools (terakoya), writing-practice halls (tenarai-jo), or “girls’ rooms” (musume yado), but for most girls and women home remained the primary site for both teaching and learning.20 In the context of home-centered study, instructional manuals played an important role. It should be emphasized, though, that these texts did not teach women to read per se; instead they either provided models for writing practice or focused on the philosophical and practical importance of literacy, with occasional attention to works with which the educated woman should be familiar. The ethos of acquiring knowledge fills their pages, which are replete with images of women reading and writing, often aloud or in a group setting, with other women. According to the classics, the ability to communicate through writing defined humanity itself; without this aptitude, humans would be no more than beasts. In other words, to be illiterate was not only unfortunate; it was inhumane. Instructional texts for women emphasize the social costs of illiteracy, reiterating that anyone who could not read or write properly brought shame on herself and on her family.21 The Joyō misao bunkō (Collected Works on Women’s Propriety, 1752) says this about letter writing: “Even if one can read well, if one’s writing is inappropriate it is a cause for embarrassment . . . . If one’s words are easy to read and serve a purpose, then one can say that it is an example of superior writing.”22 A familiar image of women’s education appears in the early eighteenthcentury instructional manual Hōgyoku hyakunin isshu (Jewel-Treasures of the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets, 1721). In figure 1, a mother or woman teacher guides the hand of her daughter or young female pupil as she brushes out kana; the inscription accompanying the illustration, itself perhaps serving as a calligraphic model, reads, “Try to put your heart into your writing-practice brush and ten thousand treasures are within your hand.”23 Onna kuku no koe (Ninety-Nine Voices for Women, 1787), by Shimokōbe Shūsui, contains a very similar illustration of a woman

figure 1. From Hōgyoku hyakunin isshu (Jewel-Treasures of the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets, 1721). Collection of Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of History.

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figure 2. From Onna kuku no koe (Multiplication Table for Women, 1787). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

teaching a child to write (see fig. 2). In addition, the boxed text describes the differences in writing instruction for girls and boys.24 It also ingeniously combines practical knowledge—in this case, multiplication drills—with moral injunctions, classical poetry, and information on other useful skills for women. Above and surrounding the illustration is the equation “two times two is four,” followed by the aphorism, “Learning to write is like pushing a cart uphill—if you only make a small effort, you will have to start again from the beginning.”25 Though the central topic of study in Onna kuku no koe was, ostensibly, mathematics, it also emphasized writing skills, and the inscriptions themselves could and did serve as calligraphy models. Indeed, because of the strong emphasis on the handwritten script in the Japanese classical literary tradition—a tradition fundamentally shaped by women’s writing—calligraphy and formal correspondence received by far the most emphasis in instructional manuals. Instructional books on calligraphy (nyohitsu bon, or nyopitsu bon) and manuals on letter writing (joyō bunshō) constitute a major subcategory of instructional manuals for women.26 And unlike the treatment of reading in manuals

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for women, writing instruction was detailed and specific and excerpts from writing manuals often were reproduced in abbreviated form in contemporary encyclopedic works that embraced a variety of educational topics. Calligraphy manuals focus on the practice of brushwork as both communication skill and art form. They consisted, as they still do today, of a collection of printed versions of handwritten calligraphic models in varying styles, which the student was meant to copy repeatedly until she achieved some mastery of them. Then as now, however, at least some instruction by a teacher was required in order for the student to fully benefit from the written models. Women were encouraged to study only with women teachers or to copy from texts only the brushwork of accomplished women calligraphers; should they base their study on men’s calligraphy, it was said that their written expressiveness would become inappropriately and unappealingly masculine. Isome Tsuna (author of Onna jitsugokyō, b. ca. 1640), one of the earliest female authors of calligraphy manuals for women, wrote in 1688 that “women’s writing should, more than anything, be gentle (yasashiku narubeshi). . . . [T]he words used in women’s writing should be those that are read, not those that are spoken.”27 Tsuna not only criticized the use of colloquial expressions in writing; she also disliked dark, heavily inked styles and script that ran together without a sense of beginning or end.28 By contrast, her successor, the most prolific and widely emulated woman author of calligraphic texts, Hasegawa Myōtei (b. ca. late 1670s), argued that if women were only taught to write “gently” or softly, their calligraphy would not improve. “What we call the way of the brush is like the human body in that it has its thin parts and its fat parts, its round parts and its flat parts, and from these the [entire] form comes together,” Myōtei wrote.29 She contended that writing in a uniformly “soft” manner rendered a person’s calligraphy undistinguished; the goal, as Myōtei saw it, was to write vibrantly, with “living words” (ikiji).30 This style, evident in the strikingly distinctive hand of Myōtei herself was what women should aim to achieve with their calligraphy (fig. 3). The gender-specific study of calligraphy using model texts was made possible by the flourishing of nyopitsu bon, most of which were written by women in the early to mid-Tokugawa period. Beginning with works by Tsuna and Myōtei and continuing with texts by Sawada Kichi (author of Onna Imagawa) and Kubota Yasu, instructional texts by women calligraphers seem to have gained a considerable following during the “golden age” of nyopitsu bon, dating roughly from the Manji to

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figure 3. From Nyohitsu shinanshū, a calligraphy manual by noted female calligrapher Hasegawa Myōtei, published in Edo in 1734. Collection of Waseda University Library.

the Kyōhō era (1658–1736), when the vast majority of calligraphic texts for women were published.31 As an indication of the continuing importance of writing skills for women and girls, by the mid-Tokugawa period female calligraphic prodigies began to gain notoriety: eleven-year-old Haruna Suma, the daughter of a farmer, wrote and published Nyohitsu iromidori in 1724, setting off a trend of publications by young calligraphic talents, both girls and boys.32 Calligraphy manuals as well as letter-writing manuals written by women began to decline in number toward the mideighteenth century, at which point manuals compiled by men began to proliferate. Regardless of the gender of the author, it is clear that becoming a competent and perhaps even accomplished writer of formal correspondence was considered a skill that women ought to possess. Further, it was a skill that women could acquire at least in part through self-instruction and practice, guided by a teacher or supervising parent.33

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Although they established standards for achievement of literacy, instructional manuals did not in themselves purport to teach women how to read and write. However, what the texts show in detail is that there were other measures of a woman’s level of culture besides years of formal education. These are more difficult to quantify, and they tended to focus not on formal study but on skills honed through observation, selfinstruction, and practice. While women “studied” classical Chinese texts, calligraphy, and classical Japanese poetry, they “learned” practical skills as well as distinctive behaviors and habits of mind that reflected acquaintance with if not proficiency in cultural and artistic pursuits; these were the attitudes and aptitudes most easily taught in instructional manuals. For instance, the Onna chōhōki does not discuss in detail great classical literary works like the Tale of Genji or the Tales of Ise (Ise monogatari, late ninth century). Instead, it lists the chapter titles of that work and the titles and dates of the imperial poetry anthologies. The Onna shikimoku, for its part, contains the table of contents of the Tale of Genji, the Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga monogatari, late eleventh century), and a brief description of the Tales of Ise. Notably, the lists of titles with which a woman ought to be familiar suggests that the appearance of learning was perhaps as important as actually being learned. This would fit with the texts’ emphasis on the social approbation and shame that would befall the unlettered. While a rigorous classical education may not have been attainable for most women, especially in the early Tokugawa period, these texts suggest that many women without access to formal schooling or teachers nonetheless could acquire literary skills through imitation and repetition, with minimal to moderate supervision. From the age of ten, gendered divisions in education are especially apparent. At this point, the Onna shikimoku advises, “[Girls] should not go out, but stay in and learn the proper manners from their parents. After this they should learn how to spin yarn, weave cloth, and to sew things and be of assistance to their mothers.”34 Contemporary accounts confirm that as girls approached adolescence, greater emphasis was placed on learning household skills such as needlework as preparation for marriage. And while men tended to go elsewhere—schools, academies, or apprenticeships—to continue their educations, for women the household was the most important educational venue. Although the importance placed on women’s education seems unexceptional in the early modern East Asian context, growing female literacy in the mid- to late Tokugawa period arguably had far-reaching positive effects on women’s status in the family and in the larger community.35

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Learning: Sewing For all women, skills such as sewing, spinning, and weaving were at least as useful in their day-to-day lives as was reading and writing, and they were accordingly held in equally high esteem. We should be careful not to see instructional manuals’ directives to focus on needlework and practical skills as advocating subjugation or isolation for women, for these skills constituted the principal elements in the Chinese model of virtue for women, laid out in the classics and imbricated in the highly valued production of cloth and clothing for the household.36 In Tokugawa Japan as in Qing China, women’s work provided invaluable contributions to the family income and in some instances supported families in the absence of income provided by husbands or other male household members.37 The early eighteenth-century Ur-text for proper behavior for women, the Onna daigaku takarabako (Treasure Chest of the Greater Learning for Women) begins by discussing the twinned importance of literacy and needlework: “Of the many skills necessary to become a woman, sewing is the most important. Along with the inability to wield a writing brush, not being acquainted with the way of needlework is the source of great shame for a woman. This being the case, while a woman is in the home of her parents, she should waste no time in assiduously applying herself to [learning needlework]” (fig. 4). Even the consorts of the sages, it goes on to say, sewed, wove, and washed clothing, so women from wealthy families with many servants to do the needlework for them should likewise “sew a little, even if only for their own enjoyment.”38 Although the Onna daigaku takarabako and other early Tokugawaperiod instructional texts discuss at length the various productive tasks women should learn, none actually give women practical instruction in how to sew. However, by the late eighteenth century, in texts such as Onna manzai takara bunkō (Collected Works on Women’s Treasures of 10,000 Years, 1784), one begins to see, for example, the inclusion of patterns for cutting a kimono from a length of cloth, with measurements for each component of the garment (fig. 5). That text also offers specific instructions on how to sew different kinds of fabric and garments: “Chirimen [silk crepe] stretches out of shape and is difficult to sew. Here is a secret tip: run a row of stitching along the edge of the fabric. Make sure the stitching is absolutely straight. If you then follow that line while sewing, you will not sew crookedly.”39 Other texts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century blend practical advice

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figure 4. From Onna daigaku takarabako (Treasure Box of the Greater Learning for Women, 1790). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

with maxims about the moral and ethical benefits of sewing and clothing production, perhaps indicating that their authors thought that women were in need of supplementary tutoring in basic sewing technique. Learning: Proper Speech Instructional texts also devoted considerable attention to topics such as proper speech and comportment. It was often said that a woman’s way of speaking was important for maintaining social harmony. For example, if a woman was jealous of her husband’s mistress or mistresses and spoke ill of them, she would foment discord and division in the family. If she derided and abused servants, the household would cease to function. Being garrulous and indulging in gossip and rumor-mongering caused dissent, and also depleted one’s time and energy. Clearly, in each case it was not only a woman’s disposition but also her practical expression of that disposition through speech that was seen as key to the maintenance of social order within and outside the household.

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figure 5. From [Onna kyōkun, Hyakunin isshu, Yōbunshō] Onna manzai takara bunko (Women’s Precepts, One Hundred Poems for One Hundred Poets, Useful Phrases, Archive of Women’s Treasures of Ten Thousand Years, 1784). Collection of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

Equally important, similar to the way that dialects or accents today reveal an individual’s regional origins or class background, a woman’s speech was a direct indicator of her level of cultivation. The most refined form of women’s speech attainable was the so-called Yamato kotoba or nyōbo kotoba, the distinctive words and phrases originally used by imperial court noblewomen. Much of the first volume of the Onna chōhōki consists of a list of proper terms, in courtly speech, for many household items, including types of food and drink. In the process of reproducing lists of Yamato kotoba, the Onna chōhōki critiques contemporary forms of expression, suggesting that the average woman has far to go to cultivate refined speech. When one hears women speaking like men it is painful to listen to. Women’s speech is imprecise and therefore softer. . . . Here, briefly, are the expressions one should know: •

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•

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One ought to say uchi no mono [for woman of the house] and shita shita [for servant]; kenai and genin are bad. One ought to say okusama [or] o-uchisama [for an upper-class wife]; naigi [or] naishitsu is too hard [sounding]. One ought to say tono [for lord of the house] or gotei; to say teishu no or otoko no is unpleasant. One ought to say moto yori [for “from the beginning,” or “originally”]; ganrai no or kongen no is dreadful. One ought to say kasanete [for “ever since”]; irai no or kyōkō is pompous. [One ought to say] Yoso e yuki kaeraremashita [for “she/he has gone out”]; makari iderare and makari kaeraremashita are disagreeable. [One ought to say] Medetō zonjimasu [for “congratulations”]; chinjū zonjimasu [sounds like] you are putting on airs.

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•

One should say yorozu no hakarai [for preparations]; bantan and ryōken are annoying. One should say watakushi mo onaji koto [for “I will do/have the same thing”]; midomo dōzen is masculine-sounding.

The list continues with “gentle expressions” preferable in women’s speech. • • • • • • •

For kodomo [child], say osanai For kodomotachi [children], say o-kotachi For naku [to cry], say o-mutsugaru For neru [to sleep], say o-shizumaru For okiru [to wake], say o-hiru naru For kami arau [to wash the hair], say o-gushi sumasu For norimono [vehicle, mode of transport], say o-koshi.40

These are followed by exhaustive lists of Yamato kotoba for clothing, food, vegetables, fish, and “other goods” (from coinage to kitchen implements), as well as “taboo words on one’s wedding night” (including “to leave behind, to avoid, to separate, to cut, weak, to be drunk, to repeat, to go back, to send (away), to stain, to dislike, to be neglected”). The emphasis on refined speech and the relatively elevated models of literary achievement set out in writing manuals for women have been cited as evidence of the spread of courtly norms of behavior to nonelites.41 And in fact the Onna chōhōki itself concludes the section on Yamato kotoba by stating plainly, “The terms [above] are those used in the imperial court, but many common people [jige] use them as well.” These lists were reprinted in various forms in manuals for women produced throughout the Tokugawa period, many of which contain extensive lexicons of common words and phrases and their equivalents in nyōbo kotoba.42 It is clear that this kind of elite cultural modeling was one important function of instructional manuals, and one is inclined to think that for many readers, especially in the early Tokugawa period, understanding the qualities and functions of courtly speech was perhaps more important than actually learning to use it. Of course, merely possessing the ability to appear or sound erudite would have held little value for a woman of high status, for whom a more sophisticated understanding would be expected. In practice, however, among lower-ranking samurai and wealthy commoner women, at whom early instructional texts were aimed, some measure of refinement and education could help increase a woman’s standing and therefore the standing of her family. This

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occurred primarily in two ways: by making learned women more likely to attain positions in service in households of high rank (discussed below) and by making them more eligible as potential spouses in the increasingly competitive marriage market (see chapter 3). In both situations, the ability to speak or even to comprehend Yamato kotoba could have a direct effect on a woman’s social and economic advancement. Learning: Beauty and Appearance Insofar as physical appearance was an outward expression of refinement, instructional manuals had a great deal to say about the vexed issue of beauty. While promotion of education and erudition for women as a means for self-cultivation was of unquestionable moral validity, advocating the improvement of physical appearance and aspiring to be beautiful could easily be seen as vain or frivolous. Kaibara Ekiken echoed the teachings of many male intellectuals in emphasizing the importance of moral goodness over physical attractiveness and warning of the threat posed by beautiful women. He writes: “Virtuous people of ancient times did not look down upon good-hearted women who were not attractive. . . . [I]f a woman has a good heart, even if she is not favored with great beauty, one should in principle take care with her upbringing and be careful to protect her [good] inner nature.”43 Ekiken derides the beautiful women in the ancient past who seduced great leaders and caused political unrest and decline: “The consort of King Yū [Ch: You, 795–771 b.c.e.] of Zhou, named Hō Ji [Ch: Bao Si], and the consort of Emperor Sei [Ch: Cheng, 51–7 b.c.e.] of the Han, Chō Hi En [Ch: Zhao Feiyan], and her younger sister Shō Shō Yo [Ch: Zhao Hede], and the consort of Emperor Gen [Ch: Xuanzong, 685–762] of Tang, Yō Ki Hi [Ch: Yang Guifei], and others were all very beautiful but because they did not have womanly virtues, they ruined their countries and destroyed themselves.”44 Shogunal officials, too, attempted to discourage an unhealthy fixation on beauty and outward appearance. However, they grounded their moral argument in the opposition to extravagance and conspicuous consumption especially but not solely on the part of wealthy commoners. Sumptuary laws for the warrior classes emphasized that “there should be no confusion in the types of clothing of superiors and inferiors,” and this applied not only to warriors themselves but to their wives and concubines as well. Beginning as early as 1663 the shogunate began placing absolute price limits on the robes worn by the shogun’s consort, the women of the shogun’s women’s quarters (ō-oku), and daimyo

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wives. In 1724 a shogunal edict declared, “Hereafter even the wives of daimyo should use simple embroidery with gold thread and the like, and they should not indiscriminately have fine clothing made. Especially servant women should be firmly instructed so that there will be more of a distinction between superior and inferior.”45 It is doubtful that these price limits were rigorously or consistently enforced, and in any case they pale in comparison to the occasional but relatively much more severe punishments meted out to commoner women who publicly flaunted their lavish clothing: townswomen were jailed for wearing clothing inappropriate to their status, and in a much-discussed case in 1680, the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi himself, during an official procession through Edo, reportedly took note of the extremely splendid dress of the Asakusa merchant Ishikawa Rokubei’s wife and servants. For the crime of “displaying his wealth in the magnificent dress of the women of his household,” the shogunate confiscated Rokubei’s property and banished him from the city.46 In spite of philosophical arguments and legal restrictions that attempted to minimize the significance of women’s dress and appearance, instructional manuals forcefully advocated maintaining and enhancing dress, comportment, and beauty as part of the repertoire of any cultured woman.47 In fact, they appropriated the same negative examples used by moralists like Ekiken and transformed them into positive lessons about the transformative power of beauty. In the section on makeup in Onna chōhōki, the author Namura Jōken writes: Boku Kō [r. 660–621 b.c.e.] of the Shin dynasty in ancient China first made face-whitening powder (o-shiroi) to use on his daughter, Rō Gyoku. In the imperial court of our country, [the Nihon shoki tells us that] in the time of Empress Jitō (r. 687–95) a person named Kansei made [o-shiroi] and the empress applied it [to her face]. From that point on, it became a makeup technique used not only to color and ornament the face, but for ceremonial purposes as well. . . . [I]f you are born a woman, not a single day should pass that you do not whiten your face. You can see examples in poetry and song of famous beauties of the past and even common women who all used oshiroi: in ancient China there was Yō Ki Hi and Gu Shi Kimi, and in our imperial court there was Sotoori-hime and Ono no Komachi. It is true that you should thoroughly apply fine white powder in a thin layer, [but] to smother everything in white—so it visibly accumulates around the ears, the sides of the nose—is disagreeable. Aside from o-shiroi, you should also apply just a touch of rouge (beni) to the cheeks, lips, and the tips of the nails. Dark red [rouge] is awful, and will make you look like a teahouse matron. [But] one thing that can never be too dark is blackened teeth (haguro); every morning you should make your teeth blacker than black.48

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The Onna chōhōki seems to suggest that a woman’s appearance is the visual index of her level of cultivation in the same way that her speech was an aural index. And yet Namura Jōken’s use of colloquialisms (e.g., the admonition not to look like “a teahouse matron”) and the judgmental, slightly condescending tone suggests an audience composed of the uninformed or perhaps, in the case of parents, out-of-date. In addition to makeup tips, Onna chōhōki describes in great detail exactly how a woman can and should improve other aspects of her physical appearance. Hair care receives the kind of attention that one tends to associate with modern women’s magazines: “It even says in the Tsurezuregusa that women are blessed with hair that attracts the attention of others—hair is a woman’s number one accessory. . . . To keep it black in color and supple in texture should be one’s concern from morning to night. As far as the condition of the hair goes, when a woman has lustrous beautiful hair flowing down, it makes her face stand out and sets it off well. So a woman should pay special attention to her hair.”49 The text then offers detailed instructions and medicinal cures for hair that has become dried out by overwashing and hair with a reddish cast; the cure for thinning hair is particularly memorable: “To grow hair, take the following ingredients and make them into a paste, then mix them with sesame oil, and apply [to the affected area]: powdered mercury, pine resin, mouse droppings, umbilical cord.”50 Hairstyling also receives extensive and detailed treatment, in great part because hairstyle was not only a component of physical beauty but also an indicator of age, social status, and marital status. Still, the opinionated nature of the commentary and the assumption that the writer possesses the authority to make aesthetic judgments are notable. Regarding hairstyles [they include]: Hyōgo, Fukiage, Tsunokuriwage, Guruguru, Maruwage, Godanwage, Sagegami, Kōgai, Ōshimada, and the currently popular Yatsushi shimada. Besides these, there are many more. The elite women (ue ue) wear their hair long and straight in back (sagegami); the urban (machi fū) styles, [popular] in the capital as well as in the provinces, are the Shimada and the Kōgai. For the last seventy or eighty years, women of high and low rank alike wear their hair this way. The Yatsushi Shimada, with its trailing end like a kimono underskirt, is vaguely erotic and eyecatching. The Kōgai, [worn with a kimono that has] long trailing sleeves looks as though [its youthful wearer] is dressing up like an adult, and is arresting. Each style should be matched [to clothing, etc.]. Both the Shimada and the Kōgai, when worn piled too high, look countryish. Like a rose inside a rough-hewn bamboo fence, [this hairstyle] should be neither too high nor too low; one should measure it just as one measures the height of a cut

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figure 6. From Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women, 1688). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

flower when arranging it in a vase. Bangs, when cut too high and too wide, are not flattering. The hair at the temples, too, if pushed back too far makes you look like a wolfsbane flower and is painful to look at. To cut these sidelocks short, however, looks old-fashioned. To dress them naturally is best. Shaving the hair at the nape of the neck is disagreeable [because] then when you put white powder on the shaved part it clumps up and makes matters worse. But to systematically remove rows of hair at the nape of the neck makes you look like a doll and is unappealing. [Instead], you should pluck most of the hair in a way that isn’t obvious.51

As seen in the above passage, instructional texts functioned as chronicles of changing styles as well as enduring beauty standards. And while Onna chōhōki dissects hairstyles by status, an ingeniously statusneutral discussion of women’s hairstyling can be found in the encyclopedic Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women), published in 1687.52 Here, in the illustrations for its section on hairstyles, each of the different styles, which are named and later discussed in the text, hovers disembodied in space as if ready to be dropped onto the head of any woman (see fig. 6).53 Equally conspicuous in its

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figure 7. From Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women, 1688). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

disembodiment is the section in the Illustrated Compendium on “currently fashionable eyebrows” (see fig. 7, left).54 The accompanying text states that all fashionable women now enhance their eyebrows by inking them in and that this is a practice that has been popularized recently by courtesans. Readers would have known that in classical Japanese court culture the aesthetic had been for both women and men to shave off the natural eyebrows entirely and replace them with grayish dots high on the forehead. The move to the shaped, inked-in eyebrow advocated in the instructional manuals was thus a radical departure, and one given a rather transgressive charge by the fact that its origins were in the pleasure quarters and not the imperial palace. The eyebrow diagram also indicates that courtesans were emerging as the arbiters of style among the urban population, regardless of class; this trend became increasingly noticeable in the eighteenth century. Clothing was also key to refined appearance. The Onna chōhōki has this to say about trends in women’s kimonos: As regards the designs on women’s clothing, among the elite (ue ue gata, i.e., the imperial court nobility), things today have scarcely changed from olden

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times. But if a samurai wife went out dressed in [a kimono with] oldfashioned patterns with a lot of gold- or silver-thread embroidery on red or white backgrounds, like donsu-, shuchin-, or rinzu-style embroidery, or one with a fawn-spotted design (sō kanoko), she’d look like a country bumpkin and people in the capital would laugh at her. Styles in the capital change according to the times. From time to time certain dye patterns are very popular but within five or eight years everyone has abandoned them. Not too long ago, the Yoshinaga ko-iro pattern, the Yūzen maruzukushi pattern, the Kyoto Hachimonya’s Yamamichi, Suzaki, and Shimokyō Uchidashi-kanoko patterns [were popular], but if you see [someone wearing] those styles now, she looks unfashionably naïve. These days, patterns stitched on brown or white backgrounds are quite popular, but these too will eventually fall out of favor. The patterns that are popular these days come mostly from the kabuki theater. People take a fancy to wearing [similar costumes] and then look extremely gaudy and unflattering. Even though ladies who wear clothing like the refined court women of old might look out-of-date, only they have an inner spirit and outer appearance that can be considered gentle. When you are young, you should wear fashionable patterns from time to time, but when you approach the age of thirty, [such stylishness] looks immature. Only subdued patterns stitched in dark colors are appropriate. From time to time, you should wear double-sided dye patterns and other [types of designs]. In summer, unlined fabrics stitched in light-colored thread are attractive. You may [also] wear layered unlined garments.55

The dominant message is clear: fashion is always subject to change. Depending on the season, the place (Kyoto or Edo), one’s status (noble, samurai, or an undefined “everyone”), and one’s age, the clothing necessary to appear cultured varies considerably. There is, notably, a nod at universal and unchanging standards among “ladies who wear clothing like the refined court women of old” and manage to reflect a gentleness of spirit that transcends their out-of-date appearance. But this praise seems halfhearted given that the rest of the passage and, indeed, the rest of the book emphasizes cultural flux and constant change in contemporary life.56 In a similar vein, the Illustrated Compendium devotes fully half of one volume to the display of fashionable fabric patterns appropriate to each season. The captions describe the patterns, which are worn by models who, judging from their hairstyles, are probably urban women of the warrior or wealthy townsman class—in other words, women of the sort who were likely to constitute the book’s readership (fig. 8). It is only at the end of this section of illustrations that the reader gets any acknowledgment of status differentiation. The last two illustrations are of women clearly labeled as courtesans or entertainers, women of the pleasure quarters (fig. 9).

figure 8. From Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women, 1688). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo. figure 9. From Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women, 1688). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

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Though these women were trend-setters in terms of fashion, they were also fundamentally disreputable, and the message seems to be that a respectable woman would wear the styles depicted at the risk of being seen as loose. The influence of courtesans and actors on fashions of the times, as Donald Shively notes, “extended to the samurai wives and even to the ladies of the shogun’s household, to the consternation of Confucian scholars who considered the observance of prescribed forms to be directly related to proper conduct.”57 At the same time, the Illustrated Compendium devotes the same detailed attention to courtesans’ ensembles as it does to those of “proper” women, suggesting that, much in the way that gentleness of spirit transcended old-fashioned dress of refined court ladies, a genuinely proper woman might be permissibly daring by adopting some of the stylishness of a courtesan. In general, the texts cited above seem to have been aimed at women aspiring to advancement into the ranks of the refined. Cultivating beauty was one way to accomplish this, in the abstract sense but also in very practical ways, for stylish appearance could help a woman enhance her appeal as a potential spouse or gain her a position in service in a higher-ranking household. It is perhaps because of the consciousness on the part of writers of instructional texts of the needs of such an audience of strivers that caused them to give appearance and comportment considerable attention in spite of the tendency among Confucian thinkers to deride superficial characteristics like beauty in favor of moral or intellectual attributes. Learning: Arts and Cultural Attainments While writers of instructional texts seem to emphasize that fashion was always subject to popular trends, they tended to view the standards within various artistic pursuits as unchanging. In fact, it is in the sections devoted to artistic accomplishments that many texts do their most detailed and directed teaching, explaining at length the protocols and techniques that pertain to various cultural pursuits. Of course, some of these pursuits are more acceptable than others; regarding the shamisen, the Onna chōhōki says, “The shamisen came to our country from the Ryūkyū Islands. Its sound causes lust and unruliness, so it is not included among the [true] musical instruments. Playing it is a skill of the courtesan. You should not spend too much time on it. However, you should acquaint yourself with the names of its various parts.” A list of the eight main parts of the shamisen (body, neck head, string pins, etc.) follows.

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The koto, by contrast, is the refined woman’s choice of musical instrument: “In the ancient past [the koto] was played by saints and sages. In China and in our country there are many women who became famous for their skill in playing the koto. In the study of the koto there are thirteen schools. The Sugagaki, Rinzetsu, Shishiodori and other schools are unorthodox. If a woman wants to play well, she should be familiar with the songs and with the names of the various parts of the instrument.”58 A list of those parts, naturally, follows this passage. While the verbal diagramming of musical instruments counts as one level of detail, Onna chōhōki takes detail to another dimension in its section on the appreciation of incense (o-kō). It bears quoting the section in full to appreciate the exacting nature of the instruction offered. •

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When placing the incense burner (kōro) on a tray, place the incense burner in the middle, the incense box to the left, and the chopsticks for holding the incense to the right. You should [also] prepare a mitsukanawa.59 Regarding the heat for the incense burner: it should come from a small bit of burning material (tandon). The way to burn the tandon is to [first] take some walnut shells and two pine cones and burn them down thoroughly, then mix in a bit of starch and let it harden.60 Regarding the rake for the ashes: it should be lozenge-shaped. In any case, you should stop the rake at an even number of [strokes]. To stop on an odd number is taboo. When burning mixed incense,61 do not rake the ashes and use only the ginban to heat the incense.62 Also, after burning the mixed incense you should not burn the finer incense. When placing the incense burner [on a three-legged stand] in front of someone, place the two legs facing toward the front, and the third leg facing toward the back. If the flame is neglected and burns a bit too hot, manaban and other [less refined] types of incense will give off a bad scent, so you should wait until the flame adjusts itself, and then you will enjoy a good scent. When the flame is strong, do not place the incense on the center of the ginban—place it on the edge. When using an incenseburning basket (eejikago) it is better to have the flame on the strong side.63 Also, when doing sorataki, you do not use the ginban.64

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When appreciating incense, place three fingers under the incense burner, and place the index finger on one side of the burner to hold it. When appreciating incense, begin with the person in the highest seat.65 Appreciate the scent once, and then once again; [each person]

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•

takes two turns. If there are over ten people, then [each person] should take one turn. When [it comes time] to discern between ten types of incense, there will be slips of paper and a container placed on the incense tray. When you have guessed which scent it is, write the name of the incense on a slip of paper and place it in the container. When appreciating incense, you should not breathe heavily through the nose, nor fan the scent with your hand, nor cup your hand around the scent. All of these actions are very disagreeable when done by women. It is better to refrain from doing anything, and simply appreciate the scents.66

The above passage is characteristic of instructional manuals in several ways, one of which is its precise description of physical movements and attitudes. There are several possible reasons for this precision in description: one is the emphasis on standardization in artistic practice in pursuits such as incense and tea, in which conduct is highly structured and ritualized; and another is that readers may have been expected to instruct themselves. The need for self-instruction would have been much higher in artistic pursuits such as incense than in basic skills such as reading, writing, and sewing, where it was more likely for women to be taught by teachers or family members. Although it is difficult to prove this point, it is intriguing to consider how precision in narrative description might be related to the accessibility of teachers for any given subject. Another way in which the passage on incense is characteristic of instructional manuals is the emphasis on the material object. The thorough description of the incense ceremony tells us much about the material culture of self-cultivation: the reader is to understand that selfcultivation requires things as well as thoughts. To underscore this point, we can turn back to the Illustrated Compendium. Illustrations—of clothing, of hair, of eyebrows—occupy only a fraction of the Illustrated Compendium. The vast majority of its many pages and volumes is taken up by pictures of things, specifically, the things a woman needs at every stage of life in order to be, or at least to appear to be, cultured. The Illustrated Compendium begins with the items of the proper trousseau: the cases in which the dowry goods are transported, the trunks in which clothing and other items are stored, the racks on which they are hung and displayed. Then there is the wedding chest and its contents: reading stand and writing implements, musical instruments, dishes, trays, decanters, stacking food storage boxes, pillows, mats, and halberds (naginata,

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for women of the samurai class). Of course the trousseau goods also included clothing, and the Illustrated Compendium enumerates every piece of it, from outer robes and sashes to socks and arm warmers. Also important are makeup items, including mirrors, rouge-mixing bowls, hair extensions, and the like. And of course no proper woman would go anywhere without her loom and spinning wheel and their various accessories. All of these are not only listed but also depicted in visual form. The obvious fact that all of these objects had to be bought and paid for by someone is left unsaid, but the message is clear: culture costs. Indirectly, this message underscored the need for women and families to attain and achieve, economically as well as socially, and this in turn created further demand for further instructional guides, a demand that commercial publishers were more than happy to fill. Testimony to the practical gains that might result from intense selfcultivation comes from an unlikely source: Shikitei Sanba’s comic novel Ukiyōburo (Bathhouse of the Floating World, 1809–13), set in a public bath in the heart of downtown Edo. In one scene, two preadolescent girls chat about their daily schedules, which look something like this: -rise at 6:00 a.m., go to writing teacher (at terakoya, or commoner’s school) -go from there to shamisen teacher’s house for morning practice -go back home for morning meal -go to dance practice -go back to school for more writing instruction -afternoon snack, then take a bath -go directly to koto lesson at teacher’s house -after lesson return home, again practice/review shamisen and dance -at end of day again review koto lesson

It is no surprise that after this litany of chores one of the girls yawns extravagantly and wails, “I’m exhausted!”67 The immediate goal of these girls’ concentrated travail was gaining employment in a warrior household, a practice known colloquially as o-tono sama hōkō, “service to the honorable lord.” With this goal in mind, they undertook a daily regimen of conventional schooling supplemented by a barrage of lessons—in music, dance, calligraphy, singing, dress and comportment, and the like. While these girls’ schedules are surely somewhat exaggerated for comic effect, they represented a familiar cultural type—the striving girl of commoner status—in late Tokugawa Edo. Instructional

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texts served to encourage and enable this culture of self-cultivation and achievement in the name of upward mobility. In the mid- to late Edoperiod sugoroku, or board games, oku hōkō, or service in the women’s quarters, became a popular theme; a player worked her way up through the ranks of ladies-in-waiting, with hopes of attaining the “goal” (agari) of becoming the consort of the lord.68 Mobility resulted from marrying well, but to aspire to a good marriage a woman first had to have skills. Even in the early eighteenth century, according to Kaibara Ekiken, many young brides were in need of better training, and by the late eighteenth century, texts like Onna kuku no koe state that because so many commoner women are marrying up (into wealthier merchant classes), even poorer families were starting to educate their girls earlier, so that they could gain the skills and polish needed to attract husbands.69 More often than not, young women who were investing so much time and energy in improving themselves were not content simply to marry; they aimed to marry into a wealthier or higher-status family than their own. For commoners, concentrated learning and practice could achieve a goal that could not be attained through family status or connections, and while teachers and schools provided necessary instruction, so could texts. Social mobility was thus a clear although never clearly stated goal of instructional texts for women. To become cultivated, one need not necessarily be born to a family of high status. If her family possessed adequate means, a woman could acquire skills and talents that signaled an advanced level of self-cultivation, and this in turn could benefit both the woman and her family by securing a profitable marriage alliance. Still, profit through marriage was by no means an abstract concept. As we shall see in chapter 3, Edo-period accounts of marriages often are as much about the exchange of goods as of the union of persons: the contents of gifts and dowries are cataloged exhaustively, and sums of money exchanged are scrupulously recorded. It is clear from such accounts that both parties to a marriage considered the union a highly significant mutual investment in the future, and for years before women reached marriageable age their families had already been devoting considerable time and resources to their cultivation and education in order to ensure the best possible outcome. In short, women were, before and after marriage, valuable and active participants in a complex strategy of self-betterment whose goal was to improve the status of the family as a whole.

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self-cultivation in women’s diaries and memoirs In many ways, the expression of self-cultivation inheres in women’s writings: that women were able to write at all, not to mention write capably and often literarily, is testament to their learning. But we can learn a fair amount from diaries and memoirs about what was required, in terms of both economic and intellectual input, to facilitate a young woman’s acquisition of a relatively high level of cultivation. Equally important, we can gain a sense of how women themselves construed their own educations and how they represented their own intellectual lives. Inoue Tsūjo Daughters of the samurai class and daughters of scholars of any status were more likely to receive sustained educations that went beyond the basics of literacy. Inoue Tsūjo fell into both of these categories, and she received a far broader and more intensive education than most girls of her era. During her early years her education was guided by her father, Inoue Motokata, a scholar of Neo-Confucian thought with whom she studied both the Japanese and Chinese classics. By age seven or eight she could easily read illustrated booklets (zōshi) and by ten she was studiously making her way through the poetry collection Kokinshū and the multivolume novel, the Tale of Genji. As the author of an afterword to an eighteenth-century published version of Kikka nikki, Tsūjo’s diary of her journey home to Marugame after a decade in service in Edo, wrote, “It was said of her that when she reads one thing, she learns ten more.”70 Tsūjo’s youngest son and biographer, Sanda Yoshikatsu, wrote that in her youth his mother “read the tales of women’s filial piety and the admonitions for women. She [later] emphasized that the basis for virtue existed within ourselves.”71 Tsūjo showed early talent in poetry composition, an accepted forum of female literary achievement due to the emphasis on classical Japanese as the mainstay of the curriculum for women. She was also an accomplished calligrapher. Although long-standing convention dictated that women should not study Chinese or the Confucian texts that comprised the canonical texts for men, at the age of eleven or twelve Tsūjo began studying the Chinese classics, not only with her father’s permission, but under his guidance, and she became an accomplished writer of prose and poetry in classical

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Chinese. It is worth noting that the figure of the scholarly, doting father who encourages and aids his daughter’s academic pursuits, even if it means transgressing or altering normative gender roles, seems to be a frequent presence in the lives of women who went on to become noted writers or artists in the early modern period.72 Tsūjo’s commendable filiality, discussed in chapter 1, may have been due to the debts she felt she owed her father for supporting her academic inclinations. Even during her early adolescence Tsūjo’s reputation as a prodigy began to spread throughout Marugame domain. As mentioned in the previous chapter, her high level of education earned her not only renown as a writer but also the unusual honor of being appointed to serve in the household of Yōjōin, mother of the Marugame daimyo. Yōjōin resided in the domain’s middle residence (naka yashiki) in Edo.73 The experience of being in service in the capital was a foundational one for Tsūjo. Her major prose works all revolve around her service in Edo—they include two travel accounts, one written during her trip to Edo and one on her return to Marugame— and a diary covering less than a year of her tenure in service to Yōjōin. This latter diary, Edo nikki, begins in the spring of 1682, a few months after Tsūjo’s arrival in Edo, and ends in the first month of 1683, although Tsūjo continued to serve Yōjōin until the latter’s death in 1689. This diary is unusually revealing about Tsūjo’s life and work and also in its depiction of the roles of women in elite households.74 For women of the lower ranks of the bushi class, such as Tsūjo, service was usually a form of finishing school; by spending some years living and working in the house of a daimyo or other ranking official, young women could learn the ways of the higher elite and hope to make a good marriage at the end of their term of service. Tsūjo’s case, however, was different. Although she was only twenty-two years old when she went into service, she was appointed to the position of jidoku, or tutor, which suggests that she was not simply a ladyin-waiting but a teacher to Yōjōin, a woman who was many years her senior and whose status was far higher than Tsūjo’s.75 In many ways Tsūjo’s experience in service bears great similarity to the career of her much better known predecessor in the imperial court of the Heian period (794–1185), Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Tale of Genji. Like Murasaki, Tsūjo was not of high birth but came from a literary family and made her reputation through her writing. Also like Murasaki, Tsūjo was brought to the capital by a male patron to serve the patron’s close female relative, with the goal of enhancing the literary and cultural attainments of the family’s women.76 And much as Murasaki does in her early eleventhcentury diary, Tsūjo often positions herself as an outsider looking in, a

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participant observer of a world quite different from the one in which she was raised.77 Although Tsūjo herself nowhere makes this comparison explicit, given her deep knowledge of the Japanese literary canon, it seems unlikely that she was unaware of the similarities. Edo nikki shows that Tsujo’s duties as tutor were many.78 Although her role was essentially an educational and administrative one, she also attended to Yōjōin’s personal needs, taking her turn doing o-tonoi, or night duty, staying by her mistress’s side through the night in case she required anything. Tsūjo occasionally records that when other ladies-inwaiting “felt a cold coming on” or were “indisposed,” she herself took on extra night-duty shifts to substitute for them. But the bulk of Tsūjo’s duties utilized her literary skills. She wrote correspondence with and for Yōjōin, and also for Yōjōin’s married daughters and nieces, who visited often. This correspondence included get-well notes, condolence letters, and thank-you notes following visits from or to her mistress’s many family members or friends and letters to acknowledge gifts received by Yōjōin and her family. Given the extensive social network that radiated out from Yōjōin, her children, and her siblings, all of whom were members of families of high rank, Tsūjo managed a large volume of correspondence. Rarely does a day pass that she does not mention writing something on behalf of someone. Her missives usually included her original poetic compositions, which she generally records—prefaced by requisite phrases of self-deprecation—in her diary entries. Tsūjo’s daily entries in Edo nikki reveal the scope of her teaching duties. For example, on the twenty-first day of the tenth month of 1682, she writes, “In the morning I went to Her Ladyship [Yōjōin]. The weather was good. I [then] read texts with Princess Karu, and endeavored to tutor her in calligraphy and other things; then in the women’s quarters I wrote some letters. In the afternoon I also wrote letters home. As night fell, the mist rolled in and obscured the moon, and O-Yatsu and I read stories (monogatari), and I read the Great Learning with O-Run.” She then notes that she worked on her own poems in the Chinese and Japanese style.79 While her principal role was that of teacher, Tsūjo seems to have learned from her cohort in the women’s quarters as well; on one occasion, she receives a poem fro O-Ume, the concubine (sokushitsu) of her lord, Kyōgoku Takatoyo. She remarks that she “placed it next to the inkstone and used it as a model” to write her own poem on the theme of the coming of winter.80 Though her competence and literary talent were apparently appreciated in Yōjōin’s quarters, Tsūjo’s diary shows that she remained in many

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ways an outsider, lonely for home—or at least this is the way she styled herself in her writings. In her few moments of spare time, she wrote letters to her family at home in Marugame and waited anxiously for their replies. She often remarks on rushing through a letter in order to send it off with a courier who is leaving soon for “home” (furusato). Tsūjo maintained an especially close correspondence with her younger brother, Sawanoshin, and her younger sister, O-En. The opening lines of Edo nikki, written in 1682, only one year after she had left Marugame, consist almost entirely of poems written to O-En, and they speak to her deep longing for home. As I write a letter home, I hear the rain and I am filled with deep sadness and trepidation. I write to O-en: Ame no yoru hakatari awaseshi inishie no toko ni hitori ya sa[bi] shikaruran As I awake from a night of rain, I wonder if in our old bedroom you too are lonely? The reply [from O-en] took a long time to arrive, and in the meantime I wrote: Inishie wo omou toko no ame mo yo ni katari awaseshi hito soko hisashiki The rain I remember falling [outside] our old bedroom also tells the world that someone is waiting there Then, this came from O-En: Na[g]ame yaru kimi ka atari ha shirasu ikue no hedate naruran Perhaps you are so lost in thought you cannot accomplish your duties? In return [I wrote]: Shiragumo ya na[g]amuru kata wo he[d]atsuran kokoro ha ona[j]i sora ni kayoe to This heart that would be obstructed traverses the same sky [viewed by] the one who is gazing at white clouds Nothing I could do would relieve the sadness in my heart.

On one occasion during her first year of service, Tsūjo writes that she had a dream in which “everyone from home, my father, my mother, everyone came here and we all had told happy stories and so forth. The next morning [when I awoke] I was so disoriented.”81 Judging from her repeated references to them, Tsūjo’s family remained her touchstone despite the distance that separated them. It is difficult to discern from

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the poems alone how much sorrow Tsūjo actually felt and how much she was employing durable poetic conventions that emphasized the sentiments of longing and loneliness. But whatever the realities of the situation were, it is clear that the written word bound Tsūjo to her family and her community; indeed, written expression constituted Tsūjo’s identity, both personal and professional. At the same time, we can note the underlying irony of Tsūjo’s situation, for she writes of her deep loneliness for home using the very literary skills she had assiduously cultivated for years, which were themselves the vehicle for her elevation to the prestigious position she occupied in Edo and which took her far away from her family. Nothing better exemplifies the push and pull of the problem of learning as self-cultivation. Sekiguchi Chie (1793–1865) While women of the middle to upper echelons of the warrior class were expected to cultivate themselves as a matter of course, well-to-do townsmen and rural notables also invested considerable resources in educating their daughters. They did so not only because of the inherent value and prestige vested in learning but also in the hope (or on the assumption) that women’s talents would enable the type of social mobility unavailable to their male kin. This in itself is a remarkable fact, one that refutes stereotypes of women’s confinement and subjugation in the early modern period: through marriage, adoption, or service in households of rank, women of commoner birth could attain considerably greater social gains than their male counterparts, who could not by law formally change status and whose interactions across status and occupational lines tended to be more restricted. Further, by the time Sekiguchi Chie was born, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, commoner women’s literacy had reached higher levels than ever before; this was especially true in large cities but also in the rural hinterlands of urban areas. In the case of Sekiguchi Chie, various types of self-cultivation paid off in social and economic terms. Chie was the second daughter of a village headman named Sekiguchi Tōemon (referred to below as Tōemon II, to distinguish him from his father and his heir, both of whom took the given name upon assuming house headship), and his wife, O-Ie.82 The family lived in Namamugi, in Musashi Province near present-day Yokohama and thus within the general orbit of the capital at Edo. Like educated and well-off commoners in the cities, rural elites like the Sekiguchi shared the dominant beliefs held by their social and political

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superiors about the moral importance of learning. At the same time, rural elites were well positioned to utilize education to engineer upwardly mobile careers and marriages for their children, especially their daughters. Chie’s father was not only a local political leader; he was also a medical scholar of some note, an accomplished writer of comic verse (kyōka), and author of a text on filial piety published in 1843. But Tōemon II is best known today as the second of five authors of a remarkable family diary titled Sekiguchi nikki, maintained by successive Sekiguchi male househeads between 1762 and 1901. What is known about Chie’s life therefore comes not from her own writings but from the diaries and records of the male heads of the Sekiguchi household.83 Tōemon II ran the village school (terakoya) established by his father to educate the local children, including his own. Judging from his published writings, Tōemon II was a strong advocate of education for women and girls, believing that a mother should be learned and serve as a teacher for her children. His wife, O-Ie, as well as his mother, O-Rie, were directly involved in supervising their children’s and grandchildren’s studies. Tōemon II seems to have kept his sons and daughters at home and educated them in his terakoya until they were about ten years old, at which point he sent them to Edo to finish their schooling. The sons—the elder, named Junji (later known as Tōsaku and then as Tōemon III), and the younger, named Kakichi—were sent to a private academy run by the noted Confucian scholar Wagi Ryūsai in Tsukiji for eight and seven years, respectively.84 The Sekiguchi daughters—Shige, the eldest, Chie, the second, and Mitsu, the third—were all sent into service in various bushi households in Edo around the age of ten, where they continued their educations on the job. All three remained in service for at least eight years, at which point they married.85 Although service in elite households was a form of work, as discussed previously, for commoner women it also was a form of education and therefore was often far more costly for the woman’s family than it was remunerative. The “support fees” (shidokin), gifts to the master and his staff, and all of the clothing, accessories, personal effects, and spending money their daughters needed cost the Sekiguchi the significant sum of at least six to seven ryō per daughter per year. And with two or, during 1812, all three girls in service at the same time, the Sekiguchi spent what amounted to between 10 and 18 percent of their total yearly income to maintain their daughters’ service “careers.”86 Like many wealthy commoners, the Sekiguchi saw this expenditure as an investment in their daughters’ futures, primarily in the form of

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increasing their chances of making good and financially beneficial marriages.87 This strategy seems to have worked. Shige entered into service at the age of ten and worked for five different households—including a daimyo of the Matsudaira lineage, a nō actor, and a hatamoto—before marrying a village official from the neighboring town of Tsurumi at age eighteen, in 1813. Mitsu served in four households and returned home to Namamugi briefly to recover from an illness before returning to service; she married an Edo merchant named Takeyama Saburōbei in 1819, when she was eighteen. The service experiences and marriage alliances of the Sekiguchi daughters benefited the family in many ways, extending its social networks and creating new business opportunities.88 The second daughter, Chie, however, was different. Like her older sister, Shige, Chie received her basic education at home in Namamugi. At the age of twelve in 1808, aided by acquaintances of her parents in Edo, Chie went into service in the Azabu residence of the Kinoshita daimyo of Ashimori Domain in Bitchū, whose wealth was estimated at the substantial level of 25,000 koku. Her position was o-tsugi koshō, attendant to the retired daimyo.89 Chie was doted on by her employers, and after she had served them for a year or so the Kinoshita proposed to adopt her; the Sekiguchi seriously considered the request, calling Chie home to Namamugi briefly to debate it, but ultimately, for reasons unexplained, they turned down this attractive proposal of adoption into the samurai class (the possibilities of social advancement through adoption are discussed in detail in chap. 5). Chie nonetheless returned to her position in the Kinoshita’s Azabu residence and remained there for another two years, until she was fifteen. Thereafter she served in a hatamoto household in Edo until her marriage in 1815, at the age of eighteen, into a prosperous merchant family in Edo’s Ryōgoku neighborhood. But after only a few years of marriage her husband died suddenly, and Chie spent several unhappy years as a widowed young mother living with her inlaws (see chap. 3), at which point she left her only son with her in-laws and returned to service. This time Chie’s experience and connections enabled her to attain a position in the ō-oku, the women’s quarters of the shogun’s palace, during the reign of the eleventh shogun, Tokugawa Ienari (r. 1787–1837), where she was an attendant to the shogun’s favored concubine, O-Miyo, a position she held for over a decade. During her term of service in the shogun’s ō-oku, Chie took up residence with her mistress in the Honmaru, the palace’s main enceinte. As Miyo’s attendant, Chie was part of the o-heyakata, the assistants to the o-chūrō, the women servants who attended to the needs of the shogun, in

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particular, his sexual needs.90 Because she was of commoner background, Chie herself did not have the privilege of shogunal audience (o-me mie) that was permitted her mistress, but she was nonetheless brought close to the highest echelons of political power because of O-Miyo’s favored status. Although the Sekiguchi Diary does not contain any information on Chie’s duties in the ō-oku (such information was privileged and kept secret in any case), it was widely known that ladies-in-waiting in the ō-oku were expected to have at least basic skills in dance, singing, and playing a musical instrument such as the shamisen or koto.91 The diary does not make note of Chie having received instruction in the performing arts, but since she went into service at such an early age it is likely that she learned these skills as part of her duties. In the ō-oku in particular, teachers of music and dance were brought in to instruct the women in service. And of course all ladies-in-waiting had to be at least competent at sewing: all applicants for service in the ō-oku were required to submit a sample kimono sleeve to show their command of needlework.92 Since Chie’s mother, O-Ie, was a highly accomplished seamstress who occasionally took orders to make clothing for her daughters’ female colleagues, one can assume that Chie and her sisters were all handy with a needle. We can thus also assume that, in addition to the learning attained through formal schooling and the domestic skills taught to her at home, by her early twenties Chie also had acquired a substantial repertoire of artistic talents. As was typical, Chie maintained close ties to her natal family throughout her service. At the time she entered the palace, Chie’s mother traveled to Edo to help her with preparations, bringing with her clothing for Chie and gifts for the Nakano and the Musashiya, merchants who acted as go-betweens in securing Chie’s position in the ō-oku. Over the course of Chie’s eleven years among the shogun’s women, as expressions of their gratitude the Sekiguchi sent gifts to the palace at least twice a year, in late summer at the o-bon holiday and at year’s end, and often for no particular occasion. They also brought fresh food from Namamugi, including vegetables, prepared foods, or sometimes fish or other sea products, on a regular basis. More often than not, Chie’s father, Tōemon II, sometimes accompanied by his mother, O-Rie, would bring the gifts to Edo personally. Chie herself sent back the occasional letter and gifts for family members.93 As discussed in the following chapter, Chie returned to Namamugi after her service in the shogun’s ō-oku, and although marriage proposals were forthcoming, she never remarried. Instead, she maintained a stimulating social life, traveling to the capital regularly to meet with old

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friends and serving as teacher, counselor, and employment agent for younger women relatives and friends. No fewer than five of her nieces went into service, one of them serving, like Chie herself, as a heyakata in the shogun’s ō-oku.94 Throughout her life Chie rose to a fairly exalted place in society through achievement and discipline, and she maintained it by exchanging labor, goods, and favors with those above and below her in the social and political hierarchy. What prepared her for this? Certainly her parents, especially her father, arranged many of her employment opportunities, but Chie’s advancement was no doubt due to her own abilities and inclinations, which in turn were nurtured by education formally acquired during childhood and young adulthood as well as skills learned on the job. By the mid-nineteenth century in the environs of Edo, the type of life Chie led was far from unheard of. Between the years 1811 and 1849 the Sekiguchi Diary makes note of twenty-two girls from Namamugi and its environs, all of them from prosperous peasant families, who went into service in the women’s quarters of various daimyo and hatamoto and of the shogun as well.95 Just as significantly, Chie seems to have lived her life without the burden of social approbation for failing to conform to convention, for had her actions and choices met with disapproval from her family it is unlikely her father would have recorded them in his diary, much less enabled her lifestyle through financial and other forms of support.

conclusion To return to the distinction between modes of education made earlier in this chapter, Tsūjo and Chie “studied” well and were also widely “learned.” Whether acquired in a formal or informal setting, book knowledge, practical skills, and artistic talents all made their achievements possible. But what of other types of self-cultivation articulated in instructional manuals, especially that of physical beauty? Interestingly, nowhere do we get any indication of what Tsūjo, Chie, or any of the other women diarists discussed in later chapters looked like or whether they were considered beautiful. For Tsūjo physical appearance was not a necessary or even important consideration for the position of tutor. But what about for Chie? Shogunal officials and even the shoguns themselves seemed to be of differing opinions as to how important it was for ō-oku women to be beautiful. Many of the most famous, or infamous, ō-oku women were extraordinary beauties, but as thinkers like Kaibara Ekiken warned, they tended to bring chaos and

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upheaval in their wake. One contemporary source states that the most important conditions for employment in the ō-oku were, in order of significance, (1) connections through family or acquaintances, (2) luck, (3) beauty.96 Similarly, upon observing an ō-oku woman noted for her looks, Tokugawa Yoshimune himself was reported to have said, “Outstanding beauty in women is a troublesome thing.” He also was of the opinion that because beautiful women could easily find husbands, it was better for plainer women to be employed in the ō-oku so at least they could earn a living.97 Given that we do not know whether she was beautiful or even whether it mattered, what might have distinguished Sekiguchi Chie from other commoner women who aspired to careers in service? Given the cost, time, and energy needed to maintain a young girl in service, certainly family wealth and support were indispensable. Connections to patrons and intermediaries also helped Chie attain her various positions. We cannot be certain about other variables, but from the information the family diaries offer, one can infer that Chie had a wide circle of devoted women friends, most of whom she knew from her various stints in service. She was close to her ō-oku mistress, O-Miyo, and even after the latter fell from power and Chie left the palace, the two remained in touch. Chie had other loyal friends from her ō-oku days. Many of these women married into the samurai class after their service terms were over, and several visited her even after she returned to Namamugi and commoner life; as we shall see in the next chapter, at least one tried (and failed) to arrange a marriage for Chie. Sociability, then, among women as well as men, seems to have been one quality that helped Chie make and maintain connections and friendships that facilitated her achievements and no doubt enriched her life. Given that instructional manuals repeatedly encouraged women to refrain from gossip, envy, and jealousy, perhaps even this most basic talent for getting along with others was another form of learning that women could not do without. In any case, Inoue Tsūjo and Sekiguchi Chie, perhaps more than most women, put their many years of intensive study and learning to use, if not always in predictable ways.

chapter 3

Marriage Because the woman will, until she dies, make the man’s home her own, the expression “to wed” is written with the radical for “woman” paired with [the character for] “house.” Also, because the woman will make the man’s house her place of residence and will no longer call her parents’ house her home, it is said that she “returns” to her husband’s house [even though she has not resided there before]. —Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki, book 3

Popular discourse on the subject of marriage in the Tokugawa period posited that just as a vassal should not serve two lords, a woman should not have two husbands. Marriages were meant to last forever, and once married, as the above quote from Onna chōhōki states, a woman was supposed to devote herself to her husband’s family and cut ties to her natal family. Her return to her parents’ home as the result of divorce or rejection by her spouse’s family would be an utter disgrace. Such popular assumptions in many ways mirrored shogunal and domainal regulations on marriage among the samurai and commoner classes, which aimed at preserving a patrilineal family system and maintaining firm boundaries between status groups. And yet marriage practices varied considerably, and, contrary to official pronouncements, among all classes divorce and remarriage were frequent and rarely stigmatized. Further, women more often than not maintained close relationships with their own families throughout their married lives and depended on them for emotional and even financial support when necessary. In many ways, the disjunction between ideals for marriage and actual lived experience seems greater than the contrast between theory and practice seen in the case of ideals of filial piety or self-cultivation.

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This chapter explores the problem presented by marriage from several perspectives. First, it briefly examines official (shogunal and domainal) regulations and laws regarding marriage in order to understand the political and legal context in which ideals about marriage developed. It then explores popular discourse on marriage by looking at how instructional manuals advised women and girls to prepare themselves to become wives. The chapter concludes by analyzing social historical data on marriage, divorce, and remarriage, as well as accounts of individual women’s lives and marriage experiences. These sources indicate that for many women marriage, rather than being a singular, lifelong experience, was often a process of trial and error, of making and remaking unions in order to ensure family continuity, secure social mobility, and, when possible, achieve a sense of personal contentment or satisfaction.

marriage as a problem: popular and legal discourses In early instructional texts such as the Onna chōhōki, ethical pronouncements on marriage tended to conform to the patrilineal principles and patrilocal patterns of lifetime monogamy: in theory, once a bride was sent to her husband’s home, she became the daughter of her husband’s parents, more bound to them by the ties of filial piety than to her own blood relations. Indeed, once married, popular rituals suggested that a bride was as good as dead to her family. Again from the Onna chōhōki: Once the bride steps out [of her natal house] and into the palanquin or carriage [that will take her to her husband’s home], [the bride’s family] lights a ritual fire at the gate and they sprinkle salt and ashes around in the same way they would if someone had died. Even the upper classes do this. The reason a felicitous send-off is made into a funereal rite is to put a curse on [the natal home], to make a bride’s repeated return to it taboo. A bride marrying into her new husband’s house should be filial to her father-in-law and mother-inlaw, respect her husband, and be understanding toward the servants, because she ought not to return [to her own home] again.1

From the late seventeenth century on, numerous instructional manuals focusing on or containing information about marriage were published. In terms of ideals for marriage, many rehearse the emphasis on monogamy presented in the Onna chōhōki; others focus on the importance of conjugal harmony, inveighing women to avoid arguing with their husbands or in-laws. More strikingly, instructional manuals devote less attention to

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the principles than to the practice of marriage, in particular, the marriage ceremony itself. The entire third volume of the Onna chōhōki describes in exhaustive detail the proper performance of the marriage ritual, from extending the marriage proposal through setting the date to the step-bystep execution of the ceremony. On the latter subject, the text moves systematically from topic to topic: the placement of wedding accessories, the seating order at the wedding ceremony, variations in the wedding ceremony, proper attire, appropriate gifts for family members, the placement of food on dining trays for the wedding night meal, the arrangement of the cabinet for writing implements (mizushi) and the wedding cabinet (kurodana), and the techniques for properly serving sake during the ceremony. The section concludes with instructions for women on the etiquette of consuming food and drink during the wedding ceremony. On consuming the ritual sake, the instructions read: Place the left knee [on the floor] and put the right knee on top of it; bend toward the left, place the left hand down, and with the right hand take the sake cup. Take the cup carefully (quietly, calmly), and begin drinking. Fold a piece of handkerchief paper, take up accompanying foods with your hand, put it in the middle of the paper and set it aside. When you rise [to leave your seat], you should take it with you. You should not place the sake cup you have drunk from on the table. You should place it on the tatami to the right of the table.2

The focus on what one might call the minutiae of the marriage ritual stands in sharp contrast to the legal discourse on marriage under the Tokugawa shogunate, which was developed and articulated in the early years of the regime. Because of the importance of marriage, Tokugawa officials were concerned to regulate and police the institution, but as was the case with most Tokugawa legislation, laws regarding marriage were neither comprehensive nor universal. Unsurprisingly, shogunal and domainal authorities most strictly enforced regulations on marriage for the samurai class. The Buke shohatto of 1615 famously dictated that “one must not contract marriages privately. . . . To use one’s marriage relations in order to establish factions is at the root of evil schemes.”3 Indeed, in the early years of its rule, the Tokugawa shogunate issued numerous statements on warrior marriage, which it intended to apply not only to its immediate vassals, but to all warriors. Notably, the shogunate conveniently excluded itself from restrictions on politically strategic marriages, and frequently used marriages, especially those of shogunal daughters, to secure, maintain, and bolster their own power.4 The importance of marriage was reinforced by revisions of Tokugawa shogunal law in the Genroku and Kyōhō eras, as the eighth shogun Yoshimune’s reforms sought to strengthen the

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analogous relationship of family and state.5 Status commensurability between spouses also was a key factor in determining marriage alliances among samurai. Marriage with an individual of similar status not only met the demands of social propriety, but in political terms it curtailed the possibility of marrying strategically to improve the economic or political status of either party. This attitude toward status and marriage attempted to negate a long tradition of upward mobility through marriage politics as practiced by the imperial court nobility, but it failed to reflect trends within the warrior class itself, as families increasingly sought to maintain or increase their status through strategic marriage and adoption. The shogunate and most domains attempted to compel intrastatus marriage among commoners as well. They did this primarily by forbidding marriages across status lines. There were, of course, exceptions: Kaga domain forbade marriages between a daughter of a priest and a son of a samurai but allowed marriage between a samurai daughter and the son of a priest. Many domains forbade marriage between peasants and townspeople on the grounds that it reduced the agricultural labor force.6 Authorities sought to regulate commoner marriage in other ways too. The marriage ceremonies of commoners were sometimes supervised by local officials, ostensibly to restrict “luxury and waste”: the content of trousseaus, the number of courses in the wedding banquet, and other evidence of inappropriate excess were monitored by local officials, and written reports had to be submitted to domainal inspectors.7 Commoners, like samurai, were told to regard marriage, reproduction, and the perpetuation of the lineage as the highest value. Well-to-do farmers and merchants emulated their samurai superiors by making the selection of a spouse a major family decision, and in fact, because many such families possessed considerable wealth, marriage and inheritance were of great practical importance as well as symbolic and personal significance for family members. While wealthy rural and urban commoners tended to adopt upperclass standards and practices of marriage, the lower classes diverged substantially. Among the poorer rural peasantry, the practice of yobai (“night visits,” or sanctioned premarital sexual liaisons) functioned as de facto trial marriages, and among the urban lower classes marriage was often an informal process involving long periods of premarital cohabitation that resulted in marriage only if the parties were compatible. All these practices, unsurprisingly, were much frowned on by shogunal and domainal officials.8 Early modern popular and legal discourse on marriage implied that it was a lifelong bond, but it seems clear that while there were discrep-

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ancies across status and regional boundaries, the incidence of divorce among samurai and commoners alike was relatively high from the beginning of the early modern period and likely rose over time.9 Statistical data on divorce are selective because they are based on studies of marriage practices in particular communities or lineages scattered across time and space, but it is probable that overall, the marriage dissolution rate among samurai of all ranks hovered around 10 percent by the late Tokugawa period, and among commoners it was likely higher, with sample studies showing significant regional differences, from a low of 11 percent (the village of Yokouchi in Shinano Province) to a high of 30 percent (Takayama in Hida).10 Neither shogunal nor domainal governments had laws in place regulating divorce per se, preferring to leave such issues to be worked out at the local level. Magistrates heard cases involving divorce only when there was a legal dispute arising from the dissolution that the parties failed to resolve on their own.11 Officials did, however, define marriage in a negative sense by punishing offenses against it, principally adultery. These sanctions did not reflect the authorities’ moral defense of fidelity in marriage as much as it did the threat of social disorder that adulterous relationships might cause. From the early years of shogunal rule, Tokugawa authorities deemed sexual relationships between men and women when one or both parties were married to others adultery (mittsū) and punished both parties harshly.12 The law made no distinction between rape and consensual extramarital relations: both were considered adulterous.13 Shogunal laws concerning adultery became more specific and numerous in the early eighteenth century; whereas the late seventeenth-century compilation of shogunal laws, the Genroku goshōshiki, contained thirteen articles on adultery, with women as the subject of eleven of them, the later compilation of laws, Osadamegaki of 1742, contained twentyfour articles on adultery, sixteen of which focused on women. Both describe in detail different penalties for women who committed adultery with various types of partners.14 Clearly, early modern lawmakers viewed adulteresses as active offenders against the sociopolitical order, and just as in the principle of punishing both parties in a violent quarrel (kenka ryōsebai), neither party in an adulterous union could go unpunished.15 Adultery thus became “an act of rebellion against legitimate authority, in which the female partner was as guilty as her lover.”16 While they were in principle severe, shogunal laws regarding adultery were not applied universally or uniformly. In fact, in many domains penalties for adultery took the opposite trajectory, becoming less

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punitive over the course of the early modern period. Further, as Amy Stanley notes, in rural villages, even those in the orbit of Edo (Musashi Province) where shogunal laws and principles might have been upheld with greater frequency, villagers seem to have preferred to use less drastic means to settle adultery cases, such as payment by offenders to wronged parties, banishment, letters of apology, or other means of applying social pressure.17 Atsuko Hirai shows that local law and precedent regarding the regulation of marriage tended to be maintained in spite of Tokugawa legal proclamations.18 In other words, although the shogunate and domains moved steadily toward implementing more stringent legal controls over marriage and family, commoners maintained customary practices that offered greater leeway in terms of acceptable behavior for married couples. In general, early modern popular discourse tended to portray ideals and rituals regarding marriage that were frozen in time, with the implication that they were valid for all, forever. Official policies concerning marriage, for their part, show two different trajectories of development with regard to women. On the one hand, laws punishing adultery clearly emphasized the subjugation of a married woman to her husband’s family by emphasizing and enforcing patrilineal marriage and its attendant patriarchal values and by severely punishing women who endangered it. On the other hand, the changes in laws regulating marriage in the early modern period showed that the shogunate considered women actors, not simply pawns of men, in the drama of adultery.

marriage and mobility in tokugawa society The degree to which women themselves exercised agency in marriage or divorce decisions in the Tokugawa period is not easy to discern, for it was dependent on multiple factors, including family status, wealth, place of origin, whether or not the natal family lacked a male heir, and the highly variable nature of the relationship between parents and daughters. A woman’s personal characteristics, talents, and skills also influenced spousal choice and the conditions under which she would marry. Skills might include sewing, reading and writing, working in the fields, managing a budget, keeping a store’s accounts, supervising servants, and getting along with in-laws. In general, a woman from a wealthy or elite family tended to have less leeway to exercise choice regarding her spouse, for considerations of political or economic gain on the part of her family far outweighed any personal preference she

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might have. Women of lower status, including the rural women mentioned above, were able to exercise more choice in spouses because of the relative informality of marriage as an institution in many villages. However, learned and well-educated women of the lower ranks of the samurai class and the upper ranks of the commoner class—like Inoue Tsūjo, Itō Maki and Sekiguchi Chie—also seem to have been able to exercise some initiative regarding their own marriages. Not by coincidence, all of these women also had very close relationships with their fathers or male patrons, who were ultimately responsible for negotiating marriages. But while the degree of any individual woman’s agency may be open to debate, it is undeniable that the phenomenon of upward mobility for women through marriage, as well as adoption (see chap. 5), was surprisingly consistent across classes in Tokugawa society. Instructional texts advised women to educate themselves well, especially if their families were not wealthy, so that they might attract a good mate.19 Families who aspired to improve their social and economic station in life had an incentive to invest in the education and upbringing of marriageable daughters as well as sons. It also meant that women’s education, though different from men’s, was not less valuable for focusing on gender-specific skills and talents as well as scholarly knowledge. Although the dominant perception of Tokugawa society is that it was defined by status, as discussed in the preceding chapter, by cultivating themselves in socially sanctioned ways women were also able to achieve some measure of upward social mobility. In this way, an essentially Confucian notion of improving the self in order to stabilize society became, ironically, a vehicle for social advancement for women through the avenues of work, service, and marriage. One dramatic example of women’s upward mobility through a combination of service and marriage was the woman known as Keishōin, daughter of a Kyoto greengrocer who entered into service in the imperial palace, was chosen as wet nurse to the future third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu, and eventually became his concubine and mother of the fifth shogun, Tsunayoshi. After her retirement Keishōin was awarded the highest imperial court rank allowed to women.20 A similar example was the woman known as O-Miyo or Senkōin (d. 1872), daughter of a low-ranking samurai who entered into service in the household of Nakano Kiyoshige (1765–1842), a middle-ranking hatamoto and confidant of the eleventh shogun, Tokugawa Ienari, and subsequently was adopted by Nakano. Through her adopted father’s connections, O-Miyo gained a position in Ienari’s inner quarters and became the shogun’s

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favored consort and mother of three of his daughters. By coincidence, as noted in the preceding chapter, one of O-Miyo’s attendants at the height of her power was Sekiguchi Chie, who herself used the wealth and connections of her peasant family to secure a place in service at the shogunal palace. Although ladies-in-waiting who caught the eye of the lord were not few, by far the more common way in which service led to upwardly mobile marriage was through its function as a combination apprenticeship and finishing school. Women who had spent a long time serving in elite households acquired the practical skills and cultural polish that could help them marry well, either within or above the socioeconomic status of their families. Adopting daughters out to higher-status families was also a way to encourage upward mobility in that such adoptions could dramatically increase a woman’s chance of marrying a man of higher status or income than that of her natal family. Parents invested in educating their daughters well, then adopted them out or sent them into service to complete their educations and augment their social connections with the aim of securing mutually beneficial marriages. This pattern was evident not only in discourse but also in the lived experience of early modern women. Kuroda Tosako (1682–1753) We have encountered Kuroda Tosako briefly as the sister-in-law of Nakayama Suzuko, the pious wife and daughter described in chapter 1. Later in life Suzuko spent a great deal of time in the company of Tosako, wife of Kuroda Naokuni, who was Suzuko’s late husband’s brother. Naokuni was a well-connected daimyo who administered numerous domains over his long career and who by the time of his death in 1735 was receiving an official stipend of 30,000 koku, placing him in the middling ranks of the 260-odd daimyo.21 Tosako’s two diaries, Ishihara-ki (Record of Ishihara, 1717–18) and Koto no hagusa (Words of Leaves and Grasses, 1735–58), both of which languished undiscovered in the archives until the 1980s, give scholars important insights into the daily life of a daimyo family.22 Although they were not wealthy in terms of stipend, the Kuroda were well placed, for they were fudai daimyo, hereditary allies of the shogunal house, and they also had close personal connections to the Tokugawa through marriage and adoption. These connections endowed them with considerable prestige and allowed them privileges that exceeded

Marriage | 101 1. Kuroda Naokuni (1667–1735) ad. from Nakayama

Tosako (d. 1758)

Toyoko lyo d. 1699 m. Matsudaira 2(1). Naomoto ad. from Tatsugawa

Toshiko d. 1736, m. Kuki

Michiko

Kumiko d. 1742, m. Naito

2(2). Naozumi ad. from Honda

Kayoko ad. by Naozumi m. Honda

daughter Komako Kazuko Mieko m. Kyogoku m. Tsugaru m. Ueda (div) m. Sugiura m. Katsuta (widower of (div) half sister) Tsugaru Tsunetoshi

concubine

daughter

3. Naoyuki b. 1729, ad. by Naozumi concubine

concubine daughter m. Saegusa daughter m. Sugiura

Fusako b. 1740, m. Honda

4. Naohiro b.1743, ad. by Naoyuki Kamejiro

daughter of Arima Ujihira 5. Naohide ad. by Naohiro

son 6. Naoatsu son ad. by Tsugaru Tsunetoshi daughter

Nagayoshi concubine daughter m. Torii daughter m. Sugiura Naokiyo

concubine Senshichiro¯ Hisako (Makino)

Kyujiro¯ 7. Naokata

concubine (Kyo¯goku)

ad. by Naoatsu

son 9. Naochika

Tsugaru Chikatari

Hinako

Naohisa

ad. by Naoyoshi

8. Naoyoshi

concubine

ad. from Sakai

10. Naoyasu

11. Naotaka

ad. by Naochika

ad. by Naoyasu

chart 2. Family of Kuroda Tosako.

their modest income. Tosako, for her part, was also of fairly distinguished parentage; she was the biological daughter of Orii Masatoshi, a shogunal official and page of the eventual fourth shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna. At an early age, however, Tosako was adopted by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and his wife, Sadako; as Yoshiyasu rose through the ranks to become the fifth shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s closest adviser, Tosako grew up at the center of shogunal politics and power in the Genroku period. Tsunayoshi visited Yoshiyasu and his family often: he went to the various residences of the Yanagisawa a total of fifty-eight times during his tenure as shogun.23 During his visits, he lectured on Confucian thought and dispensed a large quantity of gifts to Yoshiyasu and his family, including Tosako, who often helped entertain Yoshiyasu’s many guests.24 Clearly, Tosako’s adoption by such a powerful family could only increase her status and, as a consequence, her marriageability. Tosako’s husband, Kuroda Naokuni, was raised by his maternal grandparents and eventually formally adopted by them; hence he is

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known by his adopted name, Kuroda, rather than the name of his natal family, Nakayama (see chart 2 for the Kuroda family genealogy). At the age of fourteen Naokuni had been betrothed to Tokumatsu, infant daughter of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, but Tokumatsu died at the age of five, ending the marriage plans. Tsunayoshi, however, favored Naokuni, and kept him in his retinue; at twenty Naokuni became Tsunayoshi’s page (koshō), and a few years later Tsunayoshi again arranged a marriage for Naokuni, this time with the ten-year-old adopted daughter of Tsunayoshi’s grand councillor (sobayōnin). This, of course, was Tosako. Even after her marriage to Naokuni, Tosako retained very close ties to the Yanagisawa family, enhancing the prestige and power of her entire extended kin network, including her natal and married families. In her case, both adoption and marriage facilitated her own and her family’s political success. During their long marriage, Tosako and Naokuni had four daughters but no sons, and this compelled them to turn to adoption; they adopted not one but two in-marrying sons-inlaw (the first died young) for their daughter Michiko, to resolve the problem of securing an heir (see chapter 5 for details on succession within the Kuroda family). Judging from Tosako’s writings, the successful marriages (and on some occasions, remarriages) of her descendants were a major concern for her. She does not speak of prospective spouses in terms of their status or wealth, for to do so would have been terribly crass, and in any case the social world in which her family operated was small enough that speaking of a “suitable” marriage to a “good” person meant that the individual thus designated was of commensurable or higher status, with an appropriate level of achievement and ability. We get a first glimpse of Tosako’s views of marriage in 1717. In that year a fire destroyed the Kurodas’ upper residence in Tokiwabashi, just outside the gates of Edo Castle, and Tosako, her daughters, her sisterin-law Nakayama Suzuko, and her mother-in-law Jikkōin were forced to flee to the family’s lower mansion (kami yashiki) in Ishihara. During their almost two-year stay there while the upper mansion was rebuilt, Tosako kept a diary filled with details of her daily life, which she named Ishihara-ki (Ishihara Diary).25 Before their stay in Ishihara began, Tosako’s eldest daughter, Toyoko, was engaged to Nagai Naohira, son and heir of the daimyo of Akabane. Betrothal to a man of such standing was extremely fortunate, but, tragically, Naohira died at the age of nineteen in 1714, before the marriage was formalized. Another match was made for Toyoko, however, and in the fall of 1717, early in the family’s stay in Ishihara, she married Matsudaira Tadaakira, daimyo of Wakiori

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Domain in Rikuoku Province, and left Ishihara for his Edo residence. After the bride’s procession departed from the house, Tosako wrote movingly in her diary of the event. My daughter, who I thought was a child until yesterday, has grown up before I knew, and has now left me as a bride. I am full of pride and happiness, though lonely to have let go of the girl who stayed by my side all these years. I have taught her the knowledge and wisdom to manage the household and sent her off to her journey as a bride.26

Even after her marriage, Toyoko remained close to her mother and had frequent contact with her. She and Tadaakira visited Tosako in Ishihara several months after their wedding, and Tosako visited them soon after that. Toyoko accompanied Tosako to visit the upper mansion of the Yanagisawa heir, Yoshisato (Tosako’s adoptive brother), in the second month of 1718.27 Visits back and forth between mother and daughter occurred frequently in the months thereafter; on one occasion Tosako wrote, “Toyoko came home,” that is, back to Ishihara, seemingly forgetting that Toyoko’s home was now with her husband.28 When in the tenth month of 1718 Toyoko gave birth to her first child, a son and Tosako’s first grandchild, Tosako was elated and went to stay with Toyoko, remaining for twenty-three days to help out and to attend the various ceremonies for the newborn. Ishihara-ki ends shortly after the birth of Toyoko’s son and so does not describe the marriages of Tosako’s younger daughters. However, in Koto no hagusa, written toward the end of her life, Tosako wrote of her involvement in the planning and celebration of the marriages of her stepdaughter Kumiko, who was the daughter of Naokuni and a concubine, and those of her granddaughters, Kayoko, Mieko, and Komako.29 Tosako begins her description of Kumiko’s marriage to Naitō Masaatsu in 1738 by saying that discussions about finding a suitable match for Kumiko had begun several years before, when Naokuni was still alive, but since Kumiko was still young, nothing had been done. More recently, the heir and house head Naozumi was frequently away from Edo, and plans got further delayed, but now, Tosako writes, it was time for Kumiko to “go to [another] house” in marriage, for “that is what the late lord [Naokuni] would want.”30 In 1747, Tosako’s granddaughter Kayoko, the only child of Michiko and her first husband, Naonori, was married. Tosako notes that it was a “proper wedding,” that the groom was “good-hearted,” the couple’s future residence in Kagurazaka was pleasant, and relations within the

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groom’s family were cordial.31 When Mieko, another of Michiko’s daughters, became engaged in the fourth month of 1749, Tosako held a celebration for her in Ishihara. Thereafter Tosako met with Michiko’s father, Naozumi, to discuss possible dates for the wedding, which ultimately took place in the ninth month of 1750. In her diary Tosako again stated that Michiko’s husband-to-be was “kind” and that the couple seemed to get along well.32 The marriage of Fusako, the fourth daughter of Michiko and Naozumi, was quite different. In the fifth month of 1750, when Fusako was only ten years old, she was adopted by Honda Masayoshi, the biological brother of Fusako’s father, Naozumi, who was himself an adopted son-in-law and heir. As Tosako puts it, Fusako “will be taken care of by [Naozumi’s] older brother.” At the time of her adoption Fusako was betrothed to a Matsudaira clansman, but having been adopted out, Fusako’s marriage clearly was no longer Tosako’s responsibility, and she writes no more about it. Tosako makes a point of mentioning on several occasions that she met with Naozumi to discuss the betrothal and marriage plans of her grandchildren, so she clearly had some role in the planning of these important unions. However, she does not go into detail about her opinions or her involvement, and she certainly does not mention dowries or financial matters. She makes a point of writing favorably, if somewhat superficially, about her granddaughters’ husbands, noting that they are “kind” or “warm” in their demeanors. Still, such comments provide some evidence of Tosako’s attention to marriage dynamics and her concern for her granddaughters’ well-being. Both are consistent with the close relationships she had with her granddaughters, as evidenced by her frequent references to seeing and doing things with them in her diary. Tosako was also involved, albeit in a slightly more formal way, in the marriage of her stepson/adopted grandson Naoyuki. Naoyuki was the son of Naokuni and a concubine and had been adopted by Michiko and Naozumi as their heir, since the couple had no biological sons. As heir to the family headship and the position of daimyo, Naoyuki’s marriage was an important event. Tosako does not mention her involvement in the planning of the wedding, which was quite likely complicated by issues of succession. However, Tosako is very much a presence in the wedding festivities and rituals, which took place on the third day of the seventh month of 1752, when Naoyuki wed Tameko, a daughter of Arima Ujihisa (1699–1771). Although nothing of the sort is mentioned in Tosako’s diary, it is interesting to note that Tameko had been married once before, to Arima Mitsutaka (dates unknown), an adopted kinsman who was

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daimyo of Hayashida in Harima. Not much is known about Mitsutaka, except that his marriage to Tameko ended in divorce; in any case, the failure of that union did not seem to negatively affect Tameko’s later marriage prospects.33 Naoyuki visited Ishihara to pay his respects to Tosako just before the wedding, leaving Tosako “very happy, and relieved.”34 The day after the wedding, Naoyuki and his new bride visited Tosako, and she offered her congratulations. The couple then went on ritual visits to Tameko’s natal home.35 Tameko returned to Ishihara a few weeks later with her mother-in-law, Michiko, for a day of sightseeing. Tosako’s written accounts reveal that female family members, especially matriarchs like Tosako, may have had more influence on and direct involvement in the marriages of their female kin than those of their male descendants. Especially in the case of heirs to house headship, marriages of male kin had official importance that in theory placed them in the public, male-gendered realm.36 Women’s marriages, though they may well have had political and economic significance, perhaps remained within the realm of female influence. Although she was not directly involved in negotiating the union, the “relief” Tosako feels at the marriage of Naoyuki, the family heir, no doubt was related to her sense of duty toward the Kuroda family and, by extension, even to the state itself. Much in the way that she uses her diary writing to shape her identity as a daimyo wife around the maintenance of Naokuni’s legacy and of his loyalty to the shogunate, offering prayers at temples for the welfare of the realm (tenka no tame), she fulfills her duty as Kuroda family matriarch by seeing to the welfare of Naokuni’s (and her own) descendants. For Tosako, as for other women of her class, marriage was an event of consequence not only for the immediate and extended family but for as-yet-unborn future generations as well. For these reasons, women like Tosako focused their energies not only on becoming brides but also on engineering proper marriages for their descendants. Sekiguchi Chie Sekiguchi Chie’s story illuminates both the complexities and the opportunities inherent in the marriage system for well-educated and capable young women from wealthy commoner families. For Chie, as for many women of her class, service in households of rank was the means to both enhance her skills and to make important social and political connections. As discussed in chapter 2, Chie served in numerous households and ultimately rose to a position serving in the shogun Tokugawa

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Ienari’s women’s quarters. Chie’s achievements were considerable for any woman, and they were made possible by the work, planning, and sacrifices of her family members. And yet her many years in service meant that she lived apart from her family for most of her life. She married once, only briefly—widowed at age twenty-five, she never remarried—and was forced to leave behind her only child, a son, to be raised by her late husband’s family when she returned to service. In other words, in terms of orthodox Confucian cultural ideals for women, Chie was an utter failure, lacking in filial piety, abjuring motherhood, and selfishly pursuing her own career at some cost to her natal family and her family by marriage. But measured by a different set of cultural standards for women—standards that emphasized practical attainments rather than orthodox principles—Chie was a laudable exemplar, a well-educated, highly cultivated woman who raised her own and her family’s status through her own hard work and her ability to establish and maintain connections with powerful people. Exactly how Sekiguchi Chie could be both of these women deserves some exploration. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Chie’s first employers, the Kinoshita daimyo of Ashimori, had proposed adopting Chie, but the Sekiguchi refused. Had she been adopted by the Kinoshita, Chie’s status would have risen enormously—from daughter of a peasant, albeit a wealthy one of high status in Namamugi, to that of a daimyo. From such a position she would have been able to marry well within the samurai class, making her life and the lives of her offspring vastly different from that of her natal family. But it was perhaps precisely this last factor that caused the Sekiguchi to veto the alliance: though a huge move up in status, becoming the Kinoshita’s daughter would have put an unbridgeable cultural gap between Chie and themselves. Although the Sekiguchi nikki is silent on the issue, later decisions the family made regarding Chie’s marriage hint that they had such concerns about their daughter climbing out of their reach on the social ladder. After terminating her relationship with the Kinoshita, Chie stayed in Edo briefly and was asked to serve in a hatamoto household in Tsukiji, but her parents opposed this, again for unstated reasons, and compelled her to return home.37 It is likely that the Sekiguchi wanted Chie home because she had reached marriageable age, and indeed, various proposals soon began to come to her father, Tōemon II. The first was in 1812, when Chie was nineteen years old. Relatives in the neighboring village of Tsurumi acted as go-between for the family of Itō Shichizaemon, a well-to-do merchant living in Udagawa-cho in Edo who proposed to first adopt Chie and

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then marry her into their family. The Sekiguchi were amenable and met with the Itō several times before beginning preparations for sending Chie to Edo as an adoptee and a bride. In the fourth month, her mother, O-Ie, went to the capital to purchase a considerable amount of clothing (seven ryō worth) from the merchant Ōmi-ya, and she ordered materials for new bedding and other personal goods for Chie’s trousseau.38 Later in the same month, the Itō came to Namamugi bearing wedding gifts, including two obi, a salted sea bream, konbu seaweed, dried squid, and other goods. The Sekiguchi received their future in-laws with a banquet, and the Itō offered 200 hiki in cash as a wedding gift. With this, Chie’s marriage was all but finalized, so it comes as a shock when a diary entry some days later, in the fifth month, reads simply that “with regard to O-Chie, today she went to the Okinaya in Omote Udagawa chō in Edo [the Itō house] and then directly went to serve in the o-yashiki.”39 No explanation is given for why Chie did not marry and went into service instead, although the diary reports that Tōemon II went a few days later to visit the Itō and offer them two ryō “in gratitude,” although this was quite possibly a monetary gift to accompany an apology for the broken alliance; the Sekiguchi later returned the Itō’s wedding gift of 200 hiki.40 It seems quite clear that whatever the exact circumstances, it was the Sekiguchi who put an end to the marriage. At this point Chie went into service in the women’s quarters of the upper residence of the Ogasawara daimyo of Echizen, Katsuyama Domain (25,000 koku), in Kandabashi-soto. Ōguchi Yūjirō proposes that service, in this case, functioned as a “divorce temple” (kakekomidera), a refuge from a bad or failed marriage.41 In spite of this aborted alliance, the marriage proposals to Chie continued to stream in. In late 1814 the Sekiguchi received two proposals, both from Edo merchant families, but they rejected them. The spring of 1815 saw two more proposals, one from the son of an Edo town magistrate (machi nanushi, a commoner local official) and one from the Kawamura, a wealthy merchant family in Ryōgoku Wakamatsu-chō in Edo, who proposed marriage to their son Matsugorō. The Sekiguchi rejected the first proposal, but they entertained the second, and since both parties were amenable, the plans for Chie’s marriage to Kawamura Matsugorō proceeded apace. She was by this time twenty years old. At the final stage of negotiations, Chie’s father provided the substantial sum of thirty ryō as a clothing allowance and to pay for Chie’s initial upkeep.42 The marriage was finalized in an elaborate ceremony at the Kawamura residence. Thereafter, ties between the two families deepened, as the Kawamura visited the Sekiguchi when traveling along the

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Tōkaidō, and Tōemon stayed with the Kawamura when in Edo on business. The Sekiguchi also sold a large quantity of rice to the Kawamura. In addition to seeing her family members when they came to Edo, Chie, who remained childless for the first four years of after her marriage, returned to Namamugi frequently during these early years. In 1819 Chie’s fortunes changed for the better and also for the worse. In the eighth month she gave birth to a son, Takejirō. As was customary in many villages, she went home to Namamugi to have the baby, and numerous celebrations were held to commemorate the event. Within two weeks of the Takejirō’s birth, however, Chie and the Sekiguchi received notice from the Kawamura in Edo that Matsugorō had taken ill. His condition improved somewhat in the next month, but then it worsened again suddenly, and in the tenth month Chie and the baby rushed back to Edo to be with Matsugorō. Eight days later he was dead. The Kawamuras’ misfortunes only continued, for almost one month to the day after Matsugorō’s death Chie’s mother-in-law also died, and Chie was left in the unenviable position of being the mother of a newborn, a recent widow, and the only adult woman left to run the Kawamura household. It is not clear if Chie became the de facto wife of her late husband’s brother Chōjirō or if she simply remained in the Kawamura house as a widow, both of which were common for a woman in her situation. Whatever her formal status was, her life was likely quite difficult and demanding, both physically and emotionally. In the year after Matsugorō’s death, the Sekiguchi dispatched a wet nurse to Edo to help Chie with the baby, and she continued her life in Edo. In the meantime, relations between the Kawamura and Sekiguchi remained close, with occasional visits to Edo by Sekiguchi family members. Chie returned to Namamugi only three times in the next several years, but the Sekiguchi continued to send gifts and food to Chie and Takejirō, and the Kawamura visited the Sekiguchi and continued to buy rice from them. By 1826, however, signs of the difficulty of Chie’s situation begin to show in the diary: first Chie returned home alone for five days, and then later the same year her mother, O-Ie, went to Edo and stayed for twenty days. The diary reports only that she went because “Ryōgoku [the Itō] ordered some sewing,” but it may have been that she was there to discuss Chie’s future.43 In 1827 Tōemon II journeyed to Edo to meet with the Kawamura, and he formally ended Chie’s relationship with them, effectively divorcing his widowed daughter from her late husband’s family.44 But there was a cost: when Chie left the Kawamura house she

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also left her young son with them. After this, there is not a single further reference in the Sekiguchi nikki to the Kawamura family. The sad story of Chie’s marriage to Kawamura Matsugorō and the only son she was compelled to leave behind reveals several important dimensions of marriage. The first is the close and continuing involvement of the Sekiguchi family in Chie’s life, even after her marriage. Far from isolating Chie from her natal family, throughout her marriage the Sekiguchi not only maintained ties to their daughter, and supported her financially as well as emotionally, but they forged close personal connections with her in-laws as well. Second, despite the financial and social costs of doing so, the Sekiguchi seemed not to hesitate to sever relationships—including Chie’s familial connection to the Kawamura and her ties to her only child—if and when they became untenable for Chie and, perhaps, for themselves. The interests that tied Chie to her own family seem often to supersede those to her late husband, her in-laws, and even her son. Such decisions, it should be noted, would have been unthinkable for a Chinese gentry family of the Sekiguchi’s approximate status. In such a family, the daughter-in-law/widow’s primary duty would have been to her deceased husband’s memory, to their child, and to her in-laws, and she would be expected to live with her married family for the rest of her life as a chaste widow, dedicated mother, and filial daughter-in-law. As it was, however, the intervention of Chie’s family saved her from living out her days with her in-laws. And later in 1827 Chie’s circumstances changed significantly, and service once again became the vehicle for the resolution of her broken marriage relationship. Through the auspices of a Kanda merchant named Musashiya Yōjirō, Chie gained a position in service to Nakano Kiyoshige, the aforementioned patron of the shogun Tokugawa Ienari’s favored consort, O-Miyo. Nakano had been promoted to lord of Harima, and had become a trusted aide to Ienari, with considerable influence on shogunal policy. In 1828, with the help of Nakano’s connections, Chie went into service in the shogun’s ō-oku serving O-Miyo. After her ten-year contract was up, as was common practice, Chie stayed on in the ō-oku for an additional year, but in 1839 she finally returned home to Namamugi. Although remarriage remained possible, by this point Chie had been away for over three decades, was over forty years old, and knew few people in the village. Further, there quite likely was a significant gap between the cosmopolitan Chie and the Namamugi people. But there were other options, and no sooner did Chie return home than a proposal arrived from a former ō-oku colleague

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named O-Ren, who was then married to a shogunal retainer and living in Koishikawa in Edo. O-Ren proposed to serve as a go-between in an alliance between Chie and a hatamoto with a very modest stipend of some 400 hyō. Reading between the lines, the Sekiguchi were able to discern that the proposed spouse was probably an older man, probably one lacking an heir, who needed a wife with whom to bear or adopt a son.45 Tōemon II seemed to have been in favor of the alliance, perhaps because he believed that Chie’s years in service would make it difficult for her to live happily in the country and that such a match, which would send her back to Edo, would be better for her. However, her brother Junji, as family head, responded to the proposal by telling the go-between that although his father felt positively, they had not gotten Chie’s agreement and that he, Junji, “fears one of peasant status [Chie] would not be a suitable match for the aforementioned honorable person [the hatamoto].” Ōguchi Yūjirō speculates that Chie was against the marriage because she had spent years in the relative luxury of the ō-oku, had experienced the trials of marriage and widowhood with her first husband, and had no interest in now scraping by as the wife of a poor and elderly hatamoto. Also, whereas within the confines of the ō-oku differences in class background among the women were relatively muted, once they left the palace the divisions between bushi and peasants, however wealthy, were substantial. Junji, for his part, perhaps feared that there would be bad consequences if Chie ignored social conventions and married out of her status group. He might have recalled his own experiences as a rural commoner sent to study in an Edo Confucian academy among the sons of bushi, where his lower status had been made painfully obvious to him.46 Furthermore, Junji himself had, in the previous half-dozen years, undergone a series of difficulties in his own marriages and may have developed a dim view of the institution. He was married for the first time at twenty, but that union ended in divorce after one month, for reasons unknown. Junji’s second marriage lasted six years but was fraught with difficulty; the Sekiguchi nikki reports that his wife, O-Naru, ran away from home two years into the marriage and had to be forcibly brought back to the Sekiguchi residence in the middle of the night. The couple had difficulty conceiving children, and the wife apparently had been unhappy throughout the marriage. On several occasions she expressed a desire to cut her hair and take Buddhist orders, or to divorce. The couple finally divorced around the time of the death of their last surviving child, a son, in 1830. Junji remarried for the third time the next year; this time

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his wife was the twenty-year-old daughter of a Kanagawa merchant whose name was O-Toku. Three years later the couple had a son, Mansaku, who went on to succeed his father as the heir and family head, and two years later a daughter named O-Ai was born. O-Toku and Junji went on to have three more children, but none survived to adulthood. Although there is no way to know for certain, Junji’s unusually trying experiences with marriage and fatherhood might have made him less willing to force a third and unwanted marriage on his sister. Although Chie’s life was extraordinary in many ways, she was not a complete anomaly. Her life experiences have much in common with other daughters of the rural elite, as well as with that of urban commoner women. For example, the wealthy peasant family of Yoshino Michi, who was born in 1808 in Shimo Morooka, located west of Edo near present-day Ōme, also invested significant resources in her education, which culminated in eleven years of service in the women’s quarters of two powerful collateral daimyo houses, the Hitotsubashi and Tayasu. Throughout her years in service, like most women in her position, Michi maintained close ties to her natal family. She used her connections in the capital to market her mother’s hand-sewn kimonos, and she also served as a type of employment agent, finding positions in service for relatives and other young women from her native place. With crucial financial support from her natal family, Michi was able to marry, in 1839 at age thirty-one, a low-ranking samurai named Tamura Motonaga. Michi’s own parents later were obliged to adopt a male heir in order to continue their lineage, since Michi’s only brother died young and Michi herself remained in the capital after her term in service concluded. While Michi took a great interest in the adoption and helped facilitate it as well as she could from a distance, she had her hands full managing her husband’s family, for upon the death of both her husband and her stepson, the family heir, she had to arrange for the acquisition of an heir to continue the Tamura family line—no mean feat considering that she had to engineer two adoptions and several marriages and remarriages before an heir could be ensured. As Anne Walthall writes, “Without the capacities of Michi, who, after the death of her stepson, secured a financial contribution from her parents, found funds through a mutual credit association, and exploited her longstanding ties with the Hitotsubashi family to complete the loan, the Tamura family would have been done for.”47 In the end, Sekiguchi Chie never remarried, but her life was full and active. Due in great part to the financial support of her natal family, she was able to remain single and relatively autonomous. She maintained

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her connections with high-ranking women in the ō-oku and journeyed to and stayed in Edo for extended periods until her death in 1865 at age sixty-nine. As we shall see in chapter 6, for Chie as for many Edo-period women, “retirement” in their later years was a golden age of freedom and autonomy. Itō Maki Over the course of her lifetime, Itō Maki was adopted twice and married twice and through these means placed herself and her offspring firmly within the samurai class, albeit among its lowest ranks. Via adoption or marriage, Maki became a legal member of no fewer than five different families, three of whom were unrelated to her by blood: her natal family (the Kobayashi, commoner physicians in Mimasaka Province), her first adoptive family (her paternal uncle, a commoner who had risen to hatamoto status in Edo, and his wife), her first husband’s family (the Sugiura, hatamoto stationed in Kōfu); her second adoptive family (the Nakamura, also hatamoto); and finally her second husband’s family (the Itō, hatamoto stationed in Edo).48 But for all the change and disruption in Maki’s life, her main concern remained the maintenance and improvement of her natal family’s financial and social status. The letters written by Maki to her biological parents document her constant struggle to keep a tenuous hold on respectability as well as her lasting ties to her natal home. Notably, unlike women of higher status such as Kuroda Tosako, Maki’s involvement in the management of family affairs seems to have been direct and active. Her husband(s) were often away on official duty, making her the de facto head of the family. Although the formal aspects of decision making regarding the family, including marriage and adoption alliances, must have been accomplished by the male house head, it was Maki who seems to have planned and conducted the arrangements behind the scenes. Maki herself rose in status from commoner daughter to samurai wife and mother through a roundabout process of adoption and marriage. When Maki was around the age of sixteen or seventeen, her father arranged for her adoption by her uncle Kōzaemon, her father’s older brother. By the time he adopted Maki, Kōzaemon had attained hatamoto status and was living in Edo earning a 150-koku stipend and occupying an official position that involved him in the maintenance of the elaborate shrine to Tokugawa Ieyasu at Nikkō. Kōzaemon had a wide circle of influential friends and ample spending money for gifts

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and amusements, but he too was without heirs: his first wife died bearing their only daughter, and the daughter herself died in 1807 at the age of six. Kōzaemon remarried, but his second wife never bore him children. The adoption of Maki, therefore, was beneficial for both parties: Kōzaemon gained a daughter for whom he might adopt in a husband and heir, and Maki, rather than remain a commoner scholar’s daughter, gained hatamoto status through adoption by her uncle and thus became a much more likely candidate for marriage into the hatamoto class.49 This would in turn ensure the samurai status of her descendants. As planned, a few years after her adoption, in 1816 or 1817, Kōzaemon arranged to adopt Sugiura Tamesaku, whose family were hatamoto serving in Kōfu Castle, as a husband for Maki and as heir to himself. Tamesaku’s father’s stipend was 150 hyō, making them among the lowestranking housemen of the shogun (gokenin). However, Kōzaemon’s personal wealth eased Maki and Tamesaku’s finances. Their first child, a daughter named Nao, was born in 1818, their son Seigorō in 1820. Then in 1823 Tamesuke took ill and died, leaving Maki a widow in her late twenties with two small children.50 But as in the case of Kuroda Tosako’s daughter Michiko, a second marriage was quickly arranged for Maki, and it was a good one: her second husband was Itō Kaname, a lowerranking member of the ōban corps with an income of 200 hyō.51 In other words, not only was Maki able to remarry as a widow with two children, but this marriage was to a man of greater wealth and status than her first husband. Furthermore, it is clear from records that Maki was married to Itō Kaname not as the adopted daughter of her uncle Kōzaemon but as the adopted daughter of one Nakamura Sōhei, whose family had been retainers of Tokugawa since the beginning of their rule. The reason for the adoption was that the family of Maki’s betrothed was higher than that of Kōzaemon, so in order to be married into a family of the Itō’s status Maki had to first be adopted by a family of status equivalent to that of the Itō—in this case, the Nakamura. Itō Kaname, for his part, had been adopted into the Itō house as its heir, from another family distantly related to them, the Doi, apparently because the family lacked a suitable male heir. This pattern of premarital adoption in order to secure a more favorable marriage was not uncommon in the Tokugawa-period bushi class, and the fact that Maki’s successive adoptions were arranged to compensate for her relatively humble birth seems to have been transparently obvious and known to all involved and yet unproblematic. Kaname and Maki married and had two children together, one boy and one girl: Tama, born in 1831, when Maki would have been around thirty-four or

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thirty-five years old, and Kinnojō, the future heir to the Itō house, born in 1836, when Maki was forty. In other words, the savior of the Itō’s hatamoto lineage came in the unlikely person of a once-widowed, twiceadopted, middle-aged woman of commoner birth. These facts alone would have made many a Confucian scholar blanch. But given that the overarching goal for all the families concerned was to maintain or better their standing in the present and to secure heirs and the viability of their lineages into the future, the strategy was a resounding success.

marriage, remarriage, mobility, and economy As the preceding case studies show, for daughters of the elite as well as those from commoner families, marriage was an opportunity for upward mobility, albeit one that was never free of complications. For women born into the lower ranks of the samurai class, marriage could present the same sorts of opportunities for social mobility as wealthy commoners enjoyed. But for wealthy and powerful bushi families, marriage was a complicated calculus of financial and political costs and benefits. While memoirs and diaries give a relatively intimate view into the problem of marriage at varying levels of society, social historical accounts of marriage and remarriage within the warrior class give us a different and more quantifiable view of the costs and benefits of marriage alliances.52 We can see an example of the financial and status concerns embedded in decisions about marriage among the samurai elite in the case of the Sakakibara house of Takada Domain in Echigo Province. The Sakakibara were a wealthy and powerful fudai daimyo clan of 150,000 koku whose founding ancestor, Sakakibara Yasumasa (1543–1606), was one of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s most able generals. But even in a house as illustrious as the Sakakibara, financial matters weighed heavily in marriage decisions. As Matsuo Mieko shows, in the mid-eighteenth century the domain finances took a turn for the worse. Because of this, the ample cash and goods furnished by the bride’s family to the husband’s family became an increasingly decisive factor in choosing prospective spouses as well as adoptive heirs.53 Written correspondence between daimyo families negotiating marriage and adoption alliances reveals that in spite of the stereotype of the samurai who shuns money matters as crass, even high-ranking daimyo bargained like horse traders when it came to dowries.54 For example, when in 1793 an alliance was broached between the eleventh-generation daimyo Sakakibara Masanori and Sakae-gimi, a daughter of the Nabeshima of Hizen (whose assessed wealth of 352,000

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koku was almost double that of the Sakakibara), the negotiations quickly turned to finances. The dire economic condition of Takada Domain was known to the Nabeshima, and the Sakakibara flatly informed their prospective daughter-in-law’s family that if they provided no supplementary moneys in the form of construction funds to improve domainal residences for Masanori and his future wife, pursuing the betrothal plans any further would be all but impossible. The Nabeshima accepted this condition, and the two sides began negotiating sums: the Sakakibara proposed 3,000 ryō in construction funds, but the Nabeshima countered, saying they could not offer anything more than 2,000 ryō; the Sakakibara replied that anything below 3,000 ryō would “make enthusiastic discussion difficult.”55 In the meantime, negotiations over the numbers of servants Sakae-gimi would need and who would be responsible for those servants’ living costs were also worked out. Ultimately, after almost two years of wrangling, the two sides agreed that the Nabeshima would furnish 2,000 ryō in construction funds before the marriage and the remaining 1,000 ryō after the marriage, with the proviso that the latter would be considered a loan from the Nabeshima to the Sakakibara. The Sakakibara almost certainly held out so steadfastly for their original request of 3,000 ryō because the Nabeshima were considerably wealthier than they. The Nabeshima, for their part, likely considered the poor state of the domain and the Sakakibara’s lower economic status and tried to negotiate a lower amount. Yet the Nabeshima pursued the alliance all the same, because the Sakakibara were an illustrious family with a storied history and Masanori was the daimyo. To what degree anyone took into consideration the wishes of Masanori himself or Sakae-gimi is unknown. As proof that the best-laid plans can easily go awry, Sakae-gimi died about ten years into the couple’s marriage, leaving Masanori a widower with a young son. Though ambitious, the Sakakibara were also realistic, as evidenced in their arrangements for Masanori’s second marriage. Negotiations were undertaken in 1804 with the lord of Hannō domain in Shimōsa, Hoshina Masayoshi. The candidate for marriage was Masayoshi’s younger sister. Masayoshi was invested with a mere 20,000 koku, a fraction of the wealth of Sakae-gimi’s family, the Nabeshima, and far less than the Sakakibara themselves. The dowry the Sakakibara requested for the second wife was accordingly much lower: 1,000 ryō, as well as a “housekeeping fund” (daidokoro kin) of 350 hyō, paid out over several years. The reason for this discrepancy in dowry amounts lay in part in the difference in wealth between the Nabeshima and the

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Hoshina, but it was also due to the fact that the second time around Masanori himself was not as attractive a marriage prospect: he was still daimyo, but he had health problems, and he had a seven-year-old son who needed to be cared for. While the presence of an heir reduced the pressure on the successor wife to produce a son, it also reduced the pressure on the Sakakibara to ally with a high-ranking family whose patronage might later prove useful. As for Sakakibara daughters, they tended to marry well, as seen in their alliances with several daimyo of 100,000 koku and above, such as the Sakai, Hachisuka, Nanbe, Ōkubo, and Matsudaira in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.56 After a period of about thirty years in the late eighteenth century in which Sakakibara daughters managed alliances only with families of significantly lower rank—this corresponded roughly to the period of economic hardship in the domain, when furnishing dowries would have been difficult—the Sakakibara’s economic fortunes rebounded, and they again began to make good marriages with daimyo families, albeit not those of the status they had courted earlier. In spite of official pronouncements on the importance of marriage as a lifelong bond, then, for commoners as well as elites, long-term monogamy was neither expected nor, in many cases, desired. In fact, trends showing frequent divorce and remarriage seem to have pertained within the warrior class as well as among commoners. Even high-ranking warrior families, the supposed moral and political exemplars for the population at large, resorted to divorce and remarriage as they sought viable heirs to maintain lineages in the context of the growing importance of heredity in determining rank and officeholding.57 For all classes, divorce and remarriage were not desirable in themselves, but if necessary for the maintenance or advancement of family fortunes, they were steps most families were willing to take. Indeed, this characterization of divorce and remarriage as necessary evils even appeared in instructional manuals on the subject that began to appear by the mid- to late Tokugawa period.58 The research of Wakita Osamu addresses in particular the high rate of remarriage by women of the samurai class after the death of a husband or after divorce.59 He shows that divorce and remarriage rates for 1,313 women in 125 lineages of the Matsudaira clan in Mikawa from the midseventeenth century to the end of the Tokugawa period were relatively high: 10.9 percent of women in the sample divorced, and 35.5 percent of divorcees remarried (18.4 percent of women who broke an engagement, which was tantamount to divorce, also remarried), and 14.5 percent of widows remarried. The combined remarriage rate for widows and divor-

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cees was 50 percent.60 This stands in contrast to the situation in late imperial China, where the cult of the “chaste widow” was deeply entrenched in elite families. Widows were expected to remain faithful to the memory of their deceased husbands, never remarrying and living out the remainder of their lives, regardless of their age, serving their husbands’ families. Even a young woman whose fiancé died before they could be married was praised for staying true to the memory of her betrothed by remaining throughout her lifetime a “chaste maiden,” an unmarried virgin.61 Although in practice widows in China, especially in the lower social classes, seem to have deviated from the ideal of chastity and married again, the seeming ease with which widows and even divorcées of the warrior class in early modern Japan remarried stands out as remarkable. Wakita also shows that the practice of adopting a male heir as husband for a daughter (muko yōshi) was ubiquitous as a means of ensuring family continuity and, further, that families sometimes married a daughter to several different husbands/heirs in succession as a strategy for securing the most suitable among them. They did so even if it meant adopting outside the kin group; in fact, this strategy was preferable in the case of adopted sons-in-law.62 Wakita offers several examples of remarriages in adopted son-in-law alliances in the Matsudaira and related lineages in the late eighteenth century: the daughter of one descendant in the lineage of Matsudaira Noriake (1,200 koku) married two successive adoptees to provide her family with an heir; it is not clear what happened to the first, but after the death of the second she adopted her younger brother as heir, then herself remarried into a different branch of the Matsudaira (she became a consort of Matsudaira Tadaakira, whose principal wife, coincidentally, was Kuroda Tosako’s daughter Toyoko). Among less economically privileged retainer houses, divorce and remarriage also was frequent: in the Oguri house, the daughter of Oguri Nobukazu married three adoptees in succession: the first died, she divorced the second, and the third inherited and maintained the house headship. The daughter of Honme Tadahiro divorced her first husband and subsequently married a second husband and adoptive heir. Remarriages were often frequent and quite swift; occasionally only a few months passed between the death of a husband/heir and his widow’s remarriage. Furthermore, divorce, or the “breaking of alliance” (zetsuen), seemingly had few negative consequences for a woman or her family. All this leads Wakita to argue that there was evidently no taboo attached to remarriage in the samurai class.63 In contrast to the relative freedom of samurai families to make decisions about

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divorce, among rural commoner families dissolution of marriage often required negotiations involving both the wife’s and the husband’s families, and complicated cases, such as divorces involving adoptees, might also require the approval of village councils.64 All this leads us to ask, what were the actual costs of divorce and remarriage?

remarriage as represented in women’s writings Perhaps because many literate women of the upper commoner and lower samurai classes went into service, late marriage, divorce, and remarriage seem relatively frequent in the lives of women writers of the mid- to late Tokugawa period. Nonetheless, the actual attitudes of women and their families toward these practices are often difficult to discern. For example, shame regarding divorce may have been one reason that there seems to be a selective process at work in Kuroda Tosako’s shaping of the narrative of her family’s life in her diaries. Tosako had several grandchildren who are never mentioned in her diaries, even though they were born to her own daughter and were of the same age cohort as Tosako’s other grandchildren, who are mentioned frequently: the most notable absences are of Michiko’s two daughters, both with Naozumi, neither of whom are mentioned in Koto no hagusa. Indeed, their existence would be unknown if not for the records that exist in the genealogy Kansei chōshū shokafu, which was published in the early nineteenth century.65 One of these daughters (unnamed in the genealogy but in age between Komako and Fusako) married first into the Ueda family, then after the death of her husband remarried into the Katsuta family, only to have that marriage end in divorce. Another daughter, born after Fusako, and thus Michiko’s youngest biological child, married her older half sister’s husband after that sister’s death; this half sister was one of two daughters born to Naozumi and a concubine, neither of whom are mentioned in Tosako’s writings. Why are these family members edited out of Tosako’s narrative? Michiko’s two daughters clearly lived far enough into adulthood to be married, one of them twice. And Tosako seems to have been at the very least an informed and perhaps an active agent in many decisions regarding the family’s future, most notably the marriages of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It seems unlikely that Tosako would be embarrassed about remarriage, since her daughter Michiko herself remarried after her first husband died. But divorce? It is not clear. As for Michiko’s other unmentioned daughter, perhaps the association through marriage with

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Naozumi’s daughter by a concubine made her more distant from Tosako, although Tosako was extremely close to Kumiko, Naokuni’s own daughter by a concubine. We simply don’t know. For Itō Maki and her children, who were much lower in status within the samurai class than Kuroda Tosako and her family, remarriage seems to have been a natural part of life, unencumbered by shame or taboo. Tama, Maki’s younger daughter, landed on her feet after the death of her husband Heikichi, a cousin who had been adopted as heir to the Itō family. When she was sixteen, in 1846, negotiations began for her remarriage to a son of the Yōhara house whose father was an official in charge of supervising the shogun’s women’s quarters and whose income and status was considerably higher than her father Itō Kaname’s. However, the marriage plans were suspended because, as Maki put it in a letter to her parents, “the Yōhara son is not a good sort.” The son himself had been adopted by the Yōhara with the intention that he would become heir, but he had an affair and an illegitimate child with a woman of “ill repute” to whom he was never married. It is not clear what exactly ensued in the six or so years between the end of the first engagement and Tama’s eventual marriage in 1851, at age twenty-two, into the same Yōhara house, but it is likely that she ultimately married not the unsuitable first candidate but a different adopted son.66 Nao, the eldest child of Maki and her first husband, Tamesaku, was adopted by Itō Kaname after Maki’s remarriage. As Itō’s daughter, in 1834 or 1835 she was married to “a son (name unknown) of Hashimoto Zenji, a retainer the Tayasu family who holds the office of fushin bugyō,” but the marriage failed almost immediately for reasons unknown, the couple divorced, and Nao returned home.67 The divorce seems not to have damaged Nao’s reputation, for at the end of 1835 Maki wrote that Nao was receiving marriage inquiries “from everywhere” but that she and Kaname had not yet decided on a candidate. In a letter of 1836 Maki writes, “Because O-Nao is thoroughly patient, I hope to soon arrange for her to marry a man of rank, perhaps an ōban or ryōban with whom she can live in a mutually beneficial relationship.”68 As in the case of Tama, and of Maki herself, one might think that a widow or a woman with a failed marriage might have to look for a second husband of a lower status than that of her own family, but Maki’s letter reveals that she instead considered mates at the same or even higher rank (ryōban stipends were 300 hyō, while Ito’s status of ōban earned 200 hyō).69 Maki’s letters do not evince any sign of embarrassment or contrition concerning her daughters’ divorces or broken

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engagements. Clearly, remarriage for Maki and her daughters was not only possible; it was profitable in economic as well as social terms.

remarriage in popular lore: the vengeance of the “spurned wife” While divorce and remarriage may have been frequent and, in some accounts written by women themselves, a topic better left unexplored, popular tales of violence by spurned wives against their husband’s new mates were a thriving genre by the late Tokugawa period and reflect at the very least an intense curiosity about the messy consequences of multiple or broken marriages. Such tales had a history, for written accounts of vendettas known as uwanari-uchi (successor-wife revenge plots) or onna sōdō (literally, “women’s disturbances”) exist from as early as the late classical period.70 In these cases, women who had been divorced or “returned” to their natal homes upon failure of a marriage sought to avenge their rejection by doing violence against the homes, relatives, or persons of the successor wife or against the ex-husband. The earliest accounts of such “disturbances” can be found in courtier diaries from the late Heian period. Fujiwara no Yukinari’s (972–1027) diary, for example, tells of an incident that took place in the second month of 1010, in which the former wife of a Shinto head of rituals, “due to her jealousy,” went to the home of the successor wife and caused a riot among thirty or so of her servants. Two years later, according to an account in Fujiwara Michinaga’s (966–1027) diary Midō kanpaku ki (1008), the same woman committed another uwanari-uchi against her former husband’s wife.71 In these early tales of revenge there seems to have been more harm done to property and goods than to persons. However, by the late Sengoku and Edo periods there are numerous records of women attempting to do bodily harm to others in cases of uwanari-uchi. Such accounts can be found in miscellaneous writings (zuihitsu) or records of hearsay that many urban men of letters wrote throughout the Tokugawa period, influenced, perhaps, by their classical predecessors to record such events.72 These accounts, like biographies of exemplary women, often freely embellished or at least gave dramatic shape to incidents that most likely did not actually occur in the manner described. For instance, Momijishū (Collection of Autumn Leaves) a zuihitsu dating from 1660, reports that the younger sister of a retainer in Nagoya domain in Owari Province named Ueda Kurōjirō was divorced by her husband Yuasa

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Jūbei. Refusing to accept the divorce decree, she secretly followed her ex-husband home one evening and attempted to slit his throat with a razor. Jūbei managed to escape, leaving his ex-wife to slash herself and spray her blood over the back room of the house. In the wake of the attack, Ueda Kurōjirō demanded that if his sister were to die from her (self-inflicted) wounds, Yuasa Jūbei should commit ritual suicide as a matter of restitution. The Yuasa family, for their part, maintained that because their son and Ueda’s sister divorced, the Yuasa bore no responsibility to make amends. Each side stubbornly clung to its position, and the two families were on the brink of a violent clash (sōdō) when negotiations resulted in Yuasa Jūbei making some concessions and the exwife, who survived in the end, returning to her natal home.73 In another incident of uwanari-uchi, reported in a zuihitsu titled Jin’ya nikki (Diary from the Headquarters) in 1741, the daughter of the peasant Izaemon in Shimomura Village, Saku District, Shinano Province, went in the middle of the night to a house in the neighboring village of Hirai looking for a young man named Tadajirō. Tadajirō was not at home, but his father, Tadasuke, opened the door to the woman, whereupon she stabbed him in the shoulder with a short sword. She then took a razor, slit her own throat, and bled to death. Apparently the cause of the tragedy was that the woman (who remained unnamed) had been married to Tadajirō and moved into his house but after little more than a month was sent back to her family with her trousseau and a decree of divorce, on the grounds that she “did not fit in” with her married family. According to her father, Izaemon, his daughter had on several occasions requested a meeting with Tadajirō to discuss matters, but her pleas were ignored. Her final act was one of desperation and anger at how she had been treated. Ultimately, the elders of Hirai Village decided that Izaemon was owed an apology but that he must also accept the divorce decree as binding.74

conclusion The anger of the spurned wife brings us back to the oft-repeated statement with which I began this chapter: a woman, once married, should never return home. The shame of the ex-wives of Yuasa Jūbei and Tadajirō of Saku stemmed in part from the perception that they had failed in their wifely duties. And yet, like the young women who waged vendettas in the name of filial piety, their violent reactions show that they also believed themselves to have been deeply and personally

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wronged, in this case by the unilateral termination of their marriages. From these women’s perspectives, it was not they or their families who had failed but their former husbands and in-laws who refused to understand their side of the story. The message conveyed by their stories is clear: for these women marriage did not mean accepting unconditionally and without complaint the absolute authority of the male house head. At the same time, their attacks on themselves in the form of suicide attempts show that they felt they too bore some of the burden for the failure of their marriages. The double bind in which the wives of Tadajirō and Jūbei were caught exemplifies in melodramatic form the crux of the problem of marriage in the early modern family system: despite rhetoric about marrying once and forever, marriage seems to have been fundamentally conditional.75 That is, marriages lasted only as long as they satisfactorily met the needs of all parties involved, and this included husbands, wives, and their respective families. Unlike in the Christian West, marriage in Japan was not a sacrament, and to a remarkable degree it was the integrity of the lineage, not the conjugal bond, that was held sacred. Therefore, strictly speaking, the legal right to decide when a marriage was no longer successful lay with the househead, but household members, including women, also had some authority to make decisions about marriage because marriage clearly affected the well-being of the family and lineage of which they too were a part. Notably, in cases of the adoption of a daughter’s husband as heir, a woman and her family could exercise primary or even sole influence on the termination of the marriage alliance.76 And as we know, women could seek refuge from bad marriages in the so-called divorce temples, which had some authority to unilaterally terminate a marital union. Still, the sensationalized cases of uwanari-uchi attest to a public interest in the personal and emotional costs of divorce (and conditional marriage) on women, who were more often than not the wronged parties, yet were made to bear the majority of the blame. In a society in which marriage was a nearly universal experience, this was indeed a problem.77

chapter 4

Motherhood The sage Mencius said that to lack an heir is unfilial. When a man takes a wife and has children, the ancestors’ legacy continues. —Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki, 1694

Within the principle of respect for the family there is compassion, and within the compassion of the mother is the law —Inoue Tsūjo, Shojo no fu, 1676

For writers of instructional texts for women in the early Tokugawa period, motherhood primarily meant reproduction. And in fact, between 1600 and 1720, the end of the first century of Tokugawa rule, by most estimates Japan’s total population doubled, growing from roughly ten million to fourteen million to around thirty million in little over a century.1 However, beginning in the early eighteenth century, Japan’s steeply rising population curve flattened out and population held steady—even as agricultural production, the mainstay of the economy, continued to grow—until the latter half of the nineteenth century. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the population again began to increase rapidly, a trend that continued into the early decades of the twentieth century.2 In other words, Japan’s early modern and modern demographic trajectory was exactly the opposite of what social scientists expect from a country making the transition from a preindustrial to an industrial society and economy, wherein fertility rises and population grows as a consequence of economic development. Exactly why and how this “reverse fertility transition” happened, and whether it was a regional or countrywide phenomenon, has been the subject of considerable debate.3 There is general agreement among scholars that while famine and disease did contribute to 123

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significant population loss, particularly in northeastern Honshu, such “negative” checks alone could not have caused Japan’s sustained population stabilization in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.4 In addition, there is considerable evidence that “positive” checks to control family size and composition, most notably the widespread practice of abortion and infanticide, were also responsible for arresting population growth.5 Population stability, combined with continuing increases in economic productivity, primarily from the agricultural sector, resulted in a significant aggregate increase in per capita income; this constitutes what Hayami Akira has famously called early modern Japan’s “industrious revolution,” the sustained domestic economic growth that fueled the country’s late nineteenth-century industrialization.6 This narrative of “premodern economic growth” is familiar to most students of Japanese history.7 And yet it remains surprising how starkly this portrait of early modern economic growth stands in contrast to the Anglo-American adage that the rich get richer and the poor get children.8 Almost everywhere else in the world economic growth and development have gone hand in hand with population increase, but in Japan in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century evidence suggests that this was seldom the case. At all levels of society families seem to have used various means—not only infanticide and abortion, but sending out children for adoption by other families or contracting them into labor or servitude—to better correlate family size to family wealth and attempt to ensure thereby a better level of well-being for existing family members. Furthermore, this was not a phenomenon unique to rural areas, to the impoverished, or to the commoner class, for there is ample evidence of family planning of various sorts among elites as well.9 This transformation in both consciousness and family planning practice constitutes what the historical sociologist Ochiai Emiko has called the early modern “reproductive revolution.”10 In part because the socioeconomic and demographic aspects of the reproductive revolution have been so comprehensively studied by others, the present chapter takes a different approach to the problem in that it looks at how the low-fertility regime of the eighteenth century shaped conceptions of motherhood. It does so by dividing motherhood into two dimensions: the biological and the social. In the discussion of biological motherhood, I focus on motherhood as reproduction by showing how knowledge of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were represented in instructional texts for women. I discuss how the discourse on reproduction changed over time and how it related to decisions women and families made about childbearing, child rearing, and family planning.

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Instructional manuals encouraged women to procreate while at the same time exposing their readers to a culture of consumption and wealth, access to which might be endangered by the direct and indirect costs of bearing too many children. In discussing social motherhood, I focus on the development of mothering as a distinct process, in which women were taught to raise, educate, socialize, and serve as role models for their children. I find it significant that discussions of social motherhood are almost entirely absent from early Tokugawa-period instructional manuals but that over time a wide range of popular texts, including fiction and drama, came to emphasize the unique and sometimes irrational emotional attachment that bound a mother to her children. In other words, it seems that emerging social and cultural ideals of motherhood posited a level of emotional investment in children that made a mother’s role essential, yet uniquely problematic. For as the stem family structure emerged as dominant throughout the archipelago, family members were compelled to devote considerable intellectual and practical energy to creating and perpetuating the family and lineage, a task rendered more challenging by low fertility and small family size. In popular discourse, this critical responsibility centered on women, who were seen to both enable and imperil family integrity and continuity. I end the chapter with an exploration of representations of women as mothers in diaries and memoirs. Personal writings add nuance to the experience of motherhood in a world in which childhood was often abbreviated by work, education, and marriage and familial relationships were determined as much by duty and obligation as by affective ties. For early modern mothers, it seems, neither biological nor social roles were ever problem-free.

biological motherhood: pro-natalism in an era of low fertility Published instructional manuals for women present an idealized version of women’s roles and behaviors, but as with other principles and problems discussed in this book, one would not want to argue that they represent social reality in an unmediated way. Still, the continual revising and reissuing of certain texts gives us some understanding, if imprecise, of how readers responded to the published material in the form of demand for more and different types of information. Judging from the frequency with which the subject appears in instructional manuals for women, pregnancy and childbirth not only were defining moments in women’s lives, but they also were key topics in the public discourse on women’s roles and behavior.

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Unlike demographic data, instructional manuals present an ambiguous picture of childbearing. Writers of instructional manuals in the early Tokugawa period tended to echo the Chinese classics in averring that there was no greater sin against the principle of filial piety than having no descendants and that the vigorous production of offspring was the sign of a healthy population and a flourishing economy. But while these texts lay out for their readers clear guidelines for ensuring the conception and birth of physically and morally healthy offspring, they do not uncritically advocate the position that more children is better. If anything, early instructional manuals acknowledge the perils— practical and social—posed by having too few or too many children. For example, Namura Jōhaku opens his discussion of pregnancy and childbirth in the Onna chōhōki with a brief summary of childbearing practices in Japan, which he feels have diverged unhealthily from the classical Chinese norm. He points out that whereas in ancient China a couple was advised to delay childbearing until both had achieved physical maturity themselves, in Japan men and women have typically married young and commenced childbearing immediately, with deleterious effects. The summary begins with the seemingly pro-natalist quote that serves as one of the epigraphs to this chapter, but it ends with a quite different and unexpected message. The sage Mencius said that to lack an heir is unfilial. When a man takes a wife and has children, the ancestors’ legacy continues. The [children] will go on to govern the household. [But] to recklessly fall prey to lust or to impulsively fall in love and take a wife is not the proper way. Taking this into account, there are seven reasons that a man can leave his wife; it should be clear that not producing a child is chief among them. However, having or not having a child, being physically able or unable to do so is not all there is to it. If [a woman is] by nature weak, she will not necessarily miscarry; if she is strong, she still may [fall victim to] illnesses like blood clots, abdominal pains, and vaginal discharge, and she may not be able to have children. Thus, when you are born a woman you should until your dying day, in your youth and in your advancing years, remember that one day you will become a wife and then you will need to pay attention to your health and attempt to have a healthy pregnancy. Once pregnant, you should take care of yourself from morning to night, and you should be cautious about everything, starting from what you eat and extending to everything else. All the [rules] for caring for yourself during pregnancy will not be discussed separately here. In caring for the self, avoiding illness is at the root of everything. [If she takes proper care] the sick woman will make a complete recovery, the woman who is usually weak will become strong, and in either case she can become pregnant.11

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Several aspects of this quote deserve attention: one is that in contrast to the oft-quoted “seven reasons” a man may divorce his wife, of which “barrenness” is one (in addition to loquaciousness and frivolity), infertility here is not treated as a moral flaw or as an irreversible defect; it is a physiological problem with a solution, one that is literally prescribed later on in the text in the form of medicinal “cures” for infertility. In this argument, Jōhaku presages the attitudes of Kaibara Ekiken, who later offered similar opinions about the causes and effects of infertility in “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō.” The second issue worth noting is the emphasis on the woman’s health and vitality and the importance of caring for the self, as apart from the fetus or child. Third, the passage focuses on a woman’s ability—indeed, her obligation—to take action to improve her own health and the health of her unborn children. In Jōhaku’s view, women are not passive victims of fate but active contributors to the future success of the family. It is to this latter subject of the importance of women’s initiative and action that Jōhaku devotes most of the remainder of the volume on pregnancy and childbirth, addressing issues ranging from the ideal amount and nature of work and exercise for expectant mothers to the frequency of intercourse and the advisability of medical treatment during pregnancy. Again, as in the case of both filial piety and self-cultivation, popular discourse emphasizes women’s active participation in this most important of life processes. In particular, Jōhaku advances the principle of fetal education (taiiku), a concept imported from classical Chinese medical texts, which posits that the mother’s principal duty as caregiver and nurturer of her children begins when the child is in the womb. Everything the mother does—everything she, sees, hears, thinks, eats, or drinks—has a direct effect on the well-being and development of the fetus. One of the earliest articulations of the importance of fetal education is the Confucian scholar Nakamura Tekisai’s Himekagami (Mirror for Princesses), written in 1661, in which the author presents a reader-friendly summary of advice on pregnancy and childbirth distilled from Zhu Xi’s Shōgaku (Smaller Learning), a text often used for women’s education: When women of ancient times became pregnant, they did not bend to the side when leaning down, and when they stood up they held themselves steady. They did not tilt to the side, nor did they sit crookedly on their seats. When they ate, they avoided strange-tasting things, and they did not put anything in their mouths that was not cut into small pieces. They did not commit bad acts, they did not look at bad sights, they did not listen to foolish words. They did not say inappropriate things, they did not touch things they should not.

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When night fell, they had proper words read to them; when they heard the correct teachings of old, their hearts and minds were made pure.12

Inao Kōken, author of the popular childbirth manual Inagogusa (Grasshopper Manual, 1690–91), reiterates this advice, prefacing it with the admonition that “when the child is in the mother’s womb, they share vital energy (ki). The state of the mother’s heart transfers itself to the child, the movements of the mother become the movements of the child. . . . And so when a child is born and has bad habits and bad conduct, everyone will say that it was because the mother, when she was pregnant, did not take sufficient care of her body and mind.”13 Namura Jōhaku summarized this advice for his readers as well: “Now that your pregnancy is certain, during the [ensuing] ten months, exercising restraint in both mind and body is of utmost importance. ‘Do not listen to bad words, do not look at bad sights.’”14 So it went, according to the principles of fetal education. Women were advised to be hypervigilant about caring for their own bodies because they thereby cared for the fetus within. The correspondence between the human body and the fetal body is total, for the fetus mirrors the mother, and fetal development is a direct reflection of maternal actions. Some examples from Onna chōhōki clarify this. •

•

•

During pregnancy you should not eat extremely sweet things, spicy things, or hot things. If you eat these things, the child you bear will have rashes and swelling on its head. After the fifth month of pregnancy, if you have intercourse too frequently, the child you bear will be afflicted with severe congenital diseases. Beware of this. When pregnant, if you are surprised or frightened too often, the child you bear will be afflicted with convulsions [and other such illnesses].15

Other warnings about maternal consumption and fetal development are so dire as to be laughable. •

• • •

If you eat sparrow with sake, the child you bear will be full of lust and will have no shame. If you eat crab, the child will present with its hands first. If you eat ginger, you will bear a child with too many fingers. If you eat turtle, your child will have a short neck.16

In short, the text teaches that during pregnancy women not only create the environment in which the unborn fetus can thrive; they determine the course of the child’s life. One might argue that such a view

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figure 10. From Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasures for Women, 1692). Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

privileges the well-being of the fetus over that of the mother, but in the context of the work as a whole this is not the case. Women in these texts determine the success or failure of the next generation. This idea is suggested by the illustrations accompanying the Onna chōhōki’s discussion of fetal education, which depict the phases of fetal development over the course of ten months of pregnancy (fig. 10). This illustration, or slight variations of it, was reproduced in many instructional texts for women published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The main part of the illustration shows a conventionalized scene of a room in a well-appointed home prepared for a woman to give birth. At the top, moving from right to left, there are two bands of illustrations: in the bottom series of prints we see the fetus in its successive stages of development. We can see that up until the fourth month the fetus is not depicted as human but is likened to the shape of Buddhist ritual implements. In the fifth month the fetus takes a markedly human shape, and the text notes that it is at this point that the fetus develops eyes and ears. Fetal development continues, according to the text, with the growth of appendages and then internal organs, and finally the fetus turns head down in the tenth month in preparation for birth. In the upper series of prints we see depictions of various deities who were said

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to protect the fetus in each month of its development—parents were meant to appeal to the appropriate deity at each phase of pregnancy. The theme of spiritual appeasement continues in later sections, as the text goes on to list auspicious days for ceremonial rituals, such as the tying of the pregnancy sash (obi), auspicious directions in which to face on the day of the birth, taboo items that should be banned from the birthing room, predicting easy and difficult births for women according to their zodiac sign, and so on. The chapter also contains more practical information on medicines to prepare in anticipation of the birth, appropriate foods to eat immediately after birth, and proper care for the newborn. The notion of fetal education, and of a mother’s role in determining her child’s physical as well as spiritual well-being, continued to be emphasized in instructional manuals produced throughout the eighteenth century. Like most popular instructional manuals, once a template was established, information tended to be reprised frequently, and with little regard for originality or proprietary notions of authorship. The most popular texts were “revised” and republished with only minor emendations: for example, the aforementioned Fujin kotobukigusa was first published in 1689 and subsequently republished at least five times under the same title, the last publication occurring in 1814.17 Onna chōhōki similarly was first published in 1692, and over a dozen subsequent texts were published under that title, with varying levels of fidelity to the original. Thus the doctrine of fetal education and maternal responsibility—along with a holistic, Chinese classical view of the woman’s body—perpetuated itself in popular discourse throughout the early eighteenth century. While Western-influenced obstetrical medicine made advances during the eighteenth century, little of this information circulated textually among the general population. Specialist male obstetricians treated female patients in the larger cities, but for the majority of the population it was not doctors but midwives who delivered children. In the early nineteenth century, some male doctors trained in obstetrics took it upon themselves to improve the quality of midwives’ knowledge, but it is not clear how widespread their efforts were.18 Imported European anatomical texts and, by the late eighteenth century, depictions of dissected human bodies—some of them female—had some influence on medical scholars, but they did not circulate widely.19 When surgical techniques were introduced to Japan in the mid-eighteenth century by the few Western doctors who were allowed into the country, Japanese scholars and other observers were quite hesitant to employ surgical methods, out of respect for the integrity of the physical body. One

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figure 11. From Takai Ranzan, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasures for Women, 1847). Collection of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

satirical poem from 1782 made light of the Western surgeon’s callous disregard for his patients. “Right then, I’ll cut it off” the master surgeon is casual20

By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, the imagery of fetal development—in particular, the visualizing of the fetus itself—began to change, subtly but significantly. Takai Ranzan (1762–1838) revised and republished a version of Onna chōhōki, which was reprinted with new illustrations in 1847, after Ranzan’s death. As William Lindsey points out, Ranzan added to the childbirth volume his own nativist and antiBuddhist critique: “When you understand the reason for why things are, you will know that being pregnant with ritual objects and having humans developing from vajra and such defies reason. . . . Birth in divine Japan makes the guardianship of foreign buddhas unnecessary.”21 Ranzan does include a version of the original illustrations from Namura’s 1692 Onna chōhōki, with slight stylistic alterations—enlargement of images, depiction of individuals in up-to-date fashions—consistent with the illustrative style he uses throughout the text (fig. 11).

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figure 12. From Takai Ranzan, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasures for Women, 1847). Collection of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

But Ranzan also adds a new illustration of fetal development that differs substantially from the original (fig. 12). As Lindsey describes it, the new fetal images are “devoid of divinity. The fetus is alone and develops slowly from a simple cellular-like orb in the first month to a recognizable human form in the fifth month. . . . [It] takes on more precise detail with each passing month until, by the tenth month, it actually resembles a mature toddler more than a newborn.”22 In their rendering of the fetus as recognizably childlike, Ranzan’s illustrations emphasized its increasingly human nature to a greater extent than did Jōhaku’s originals. In Ranzan’s view, in addition to being connected to the divine, by late pregnancy the woman’s body became a vessel for an already formed human being. The tendency toward the humanization of the fetus continued in Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women), written by Okada Gyokuzan and published in 1812. In this text, the visual conventions of earlier illustrations of the stages of fetal development are magnified and transformed. In this case, the fetus’s

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early form is likened not to Buddhist ritual implements but to natural phenomena: a drop of dew (first month) and a peach leaf (second month). In the third month “for the first time one can discern the difference between male and female,” and by the fourth month the fetus not only has assumed a human shape (in the earlier Onna chōhōki illustration the fetus does not assume human shape until the fifth month), but is standing upright, propped up by the guardian deities for that month, the bodhisattva Fugen (representing Buddhism) and Ōhara Daimyōjin (representing Shintō) (fig. 13); by the sixth month the fetus’s five internal organs have developed, it has grown hair and has more defined facial features, and it stands independently of the supervising deities, the bodhisattva Jizō and Gion Daimyōjin (fig. 14); by the sixth month the fetus has completely developed internal organs and is accompanied by the bodhisattva Miroku and Keta Daimyōjin (fig. 15); in subsequent months it grows larger, more autonomous, and more distinctly childlike in appearance, until the tenth month, when it takes on a Buddha nature and is born.23 These images promote a view of the fetus-as-child, notably separate from the body of its mother, and they encourage readers to see the fetus not as inchoate matter but as a fully formed being. As the foregoing examples show, in popular discourse the moment of transformation from nonhuman to human status also became more precisely defined, centering on the fourth or fifth month of gestation.24 The growing knowledge of human anatomy in general and obstetrical science in particular would account for some of the details depicted in the Onna zassho kyōkun kagami. But one must also consider these images in the context of the rise of antiabortion and anti-infanticide rhetoric in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.25 Such rhetoric was not entirely new, for edicts against abortion and infanticide were first issued by the shogunate during the reign of the fifth shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, in the late seventeenth century, as part of his Buddhist-influenced “compassion for life” policies.26 At the same time, Confucian thinkers inveighed against the practice of infanticide: the writer Nishikawa Jōken (1648–1724) called infanticide an “act of depravity.”27 Official concern with abortion and infanticide grew substantially in the wake of famines and outbreaks of disease in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when infanticide and abortion were reported to be widespread among the impoverished, especially in northeastern Honshu. Officials and intellectuals strongly condemned their practice, often using vivid depictions, both visual and verbal, of the horrible spiritual fates that awaited those who killed their children.

figure 13. The fetus in the fourth month of gestation, from Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women, 1812). Collection of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

figure 14. The fetus in the fifth month of gestation, from Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women, 1812). Collection of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

figure 15. The fetus in the sixth month of gestation, from Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women, 1812). Collection of Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

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Most often, it was women who were demonized as the instigators of infanticide.28 Also by the turn of the nineteenth century, the spread of obstetrical medicine and knowledge of the female body allowed doctors to depict and describe the fetus in the womb with much greater accuracy and detail. Most influential in this process was the work of the physician Kagawa Gen’etsu (1700–77), whose book Obstetrical Theory (Sanka ron), published in 1756, was one of the first texts to describe the female reproductive system in detail. The Kagawa method, which gained popularity in the late eighteenth century, advocated the use of forceps to extract the fetus during difficult births, thus saving the mother’s life.29 In many ways, the new obstetrical knowledge allowed (male) physicians to intervene more directly and frequently in the reproductive process, regardless of the wishes of the pregnant woman.30 These medical practices were harnessed to the renascent pro-natalist, antiabortion, and anti-infanticide movements, and new obstetrical knowledge soon spread to the countryside through the circulation of graphic visual depictions of stages of fetal development that sought to persuade viewers that fetuses were small children and thus abortion, like infanticide, was murder.31 Both Emiko Ochiai and Fabian Drixler argue that early nineteenth-century population growth coincides with the successful spread of these antiabortion, pro-natalist ideals. As Ochiai puts it, “The early modern revolution in reproductive practices took place precisely at . . . a time of growth at the end of the eighteenth century. . . . The growth [also] coincided with the initial stage of centralized control over individual lives.”32 Drixler uses statistical analysis to draw a direct line from antiabortion rhetoric to population growth in the northeastern provinces.33 Both these narratives show that the pressures on women to bear more children, both real and rhetorical, increased in the late Tokugawa period. This rhetoric was reinforced at the popular level by laws and regulations aimed at curbing infanticide and abortion. By the turn of the nineteenth century, domainal and city officials had become responsible for enforcing laws requiring the registering of pregnancies and births. Their main concern was to prevent the concealment and early termination of pregnancies, and laws became increasingly severe over time, as punishments for concealing or failing to report a pregnancy became more dire and more rigorously enforced, ranging from fines to beatings to imprisonment, not only of women, but of those who conspired to aid a woman in the concealment and/or termination of a pregnancy and those

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(including doctors and officials) who failed to stop it.34 Sawayama Mikako argues, like Ochiai, that changing conceptions of childbirth, primarily a greater awareness of fetal development, enabled officials to intervene in women’s reproductive lives to enforce laws promoting the pro-natalist goals of the state. As Sawayama puts it, “The conception and childbirth regulations enveloped women’s birthing bodies in the power relations among the three groups of domain, community, and populace. Conception reports [required official notices to local officials reporting a woman’s pregnancy] were a strict obligation; women’s birthing bodies were caught in the net of official supervision and placed under the mutual surveillance of the community.”35 Ochiai’s, Drixler’s, and Sawayama’s arguments highlight the demographic and political contexts in which early modern discourses on childbearing were embedded. Declining population and long-standing traditions of family planning in which women had considerable autonomy collided in the late Tokugawa period with the goals of the state in ways that it did not previously. New images of the fetus and fetal development are one indication of a new anxiety about reproduction and a concomitant need to promote, if indirectly, pro-natalist ideas. In a similar vein, Wakita Haruko has argued that the shift from the medieval to the early modern period involved a transition from considering the mother and fetus as a single entity to a separation of the two and the valuation of the fetus over and above the mother.36 Wakita’s theory has been supported from many angles, most notably, by scholars of religion, who point to the popularization of the concept of the “Blood-pool hell,” a realm of infernal suffering to which women who died in childbirth (taking with them their fetuses/children) were condemned. In this view, the development and spread of the concept of the Blood-pool hell and of sutras and rituals concerning it was a sign of the emergence of the idea that a mother who died in childbirth was spiritually burdened.37 The communal concern, however, was not with the mother but with her fetus, and ritual practices and beliefs sought to “save” the fetus from the fate of the mother, sometimes by (gruesomely and posthumously) removing it from her body. However, not all scholars agree with this narrative of a steady loss of women’s autonomy and power. In her work on the history of the ubuya (birthing or parturition house), Hitomi Tonomura has shown how the misunderstanding of the ubuya “trope” has led to overemphasis on the taboos against childbirth and menstruation as inherently defiling.38 Ubuya, she contends, were not used everywhere or always, and even where they were used they did not mean the birthing mother was

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ostracized or excluded from the family and community. Tonomura argues that the separation of the ubuya can be seen as a source of individuation and strength rather than isolation and ostracism. Susan Burns also supports the idea that conceptions of women’s birthing bodies did not shift so dramatically in the early modern period. She asserts that “ ‘modern’ has been employed by a series of commentators seeking to denote the ‘difference’ of the ideas of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth that emerged in the late eighteenth century. But . . . these developments in ideas about pregnancy and childbirth, while significant, did not of themselves lead to the creation of a definitively new conception of the body. The female body constituted in the late Tokugawa medical and political theory on reproduction . . . was a body still ordered by Confucian conceptions of cosmology and ethicality.”39 Finally, there is a revisionist view of the influence of dominant “Confucian conceptions” themselves. The rise of patriarchy and patrilinealism as a result of the adoption of Confucian and Neo-Confucian ideology beginning in the early seventeenth century was in the past commonly cited as the main cause of a perceived steady decline in women’s power in the early modern period. However, recent English-language scholarship in gender history has taken the teleological aspects of this model to task, with the aim of cumulatively breaking down, modifying, or adding nuance to the phenomenon of “Confucianization” and qualifying the effects it had on gender roles and women’s autonomy.40 Taking the foregoing viewpoints into consideration, I seek to understand whether and how women’s autonomy developed within social and political structures and institutions meant to confine it. With regard to conception, pregnancy, and birth, early Tokugawa-period instruction manuals for women seem to make several assumptions: (a) childbirth is part of a natural progression of the female life cycle (in Onna chōhōki, for example, the volume on childbirth follows the volume on marriage); (b) pregnancy and childbirth are predominantly women’s concerns, with men completely absent from all aspects of the discussion and the attendants at the birth midwives;41 (c) pregnancy and childbirth are understandable processes that, while ultimately beyond complete human control, can nevertheless be carefully managed by women, for the benefit of themselves and their families; and (d) even as the fetus emerges as a distinctly human presence in the popular discourse on childbirth, the importance of the mother in the process of reproduction does not decline significantly. In other words, while instructional texts did not suggest women could control everything about childbirth,

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neither were women “borrowed wombs” subject to the patriarchal and patrilineal prerogatives of a society shaped by androcentric warrior values. And while reproduction is shown to be natural and the production of healthy children desirable, nowhere do these texts suggest that extreme fecundity is a goal to which women should aspire. Indeed, they caution against early and frequent pregnancies on the grounds that they damaged a woman’s health. If anything, the texts attend to the importance of each individual pregnancy and birth rather than advocating unqualified pro-natalism. The importance placed on women’s health and women’s roles as managers of the process of conception, birth, and child rearing remains a constant in popular discourse into the early nineteenth century. We might see this persistent discursive presence as a thread of continuity in an era of demographic change.42

social motherhood: absence within ubiquity Another and equally important reason women were valued for reasons other than their reproductive capabilities has to do with their increasingly distinct social roles as mothers in the context of the growing importance of the smaller stem family in the mid- to late Tokugawa period. While childbirth and reproduction were key topics in instructional texts published throughout the early modern period, the discourse on motherhood as a social concept was relatively late to appear in that particular genre: one does not begin to see it emphasized until around the early nineteenth century. In popular literature and drama, the image of the mother is present from the very beginning of the early modern period and has roots in late medieval sources, but these images developed and changed significantly over the course of the Tokugawa period. In ukiyoe, likewise, while the visual image of the mother is present in early prints and book illustrations, the celebration of the mother’s unique role as nurturer, companion, and playmate of her children begins to be emphasized only in the early nineteenth century. Why are mothers—so important to the continuity of the family system—so late to appear as cultural symbols in the early modern period? In instructional manuals and moral guides for women published from the latter part of seventeenth century into the first decades of the eighteenth century, the topic of motherhood scarcely appears. For the modern reader searching for the allegedly deep historical and cultural roots of the ryōsai kenbo (good wife, wise mother) ideal, it is surprising

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to find that few of the most frequently cited early tracts on women’s roles and behavior discuss ideals for motherhood per se in any depth. Rather, what these texts emphasize is the importance of overarching values like obedience, filiality, discretion, and duty to husband and inlaws. The Onna Imagawa cautions women: “do not forget to deeply honor one’s parents or neglect the path of filial duty”; “do not scorn or make light of one’s husband and flaunt oneself, for this disregards the way of heaven”; “do not treat your parents-in-law poorly, or you will earn the scorn of others”; and “[do not] neglect your stepchildren, and then ignore the criticism of others.”43 These admonitions are repeated in other early Tokugawa texts for women. For example, in the opening volume of Onna chōhōki, the first four items on a list of things women should be cautious about are • • • •

Being filial to their parents Being unfilial to their mothers-in-law Being respectful to their husbands Despising their stepchildren44

Although mothers and especially mothers-in-law hover in the background of these texts as objects of filial piety, the maternal presence itself is muted. Admonitions not to neglect or abuse one’s stepchildren are frequent, yet the moral and ethical obligations of a mother to her biological children receive little attention. Nor is the emotional bond between mother and child discussed at great length in other widely circulated texts for women from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, such as Onna shikimoku, Onna jitsugokyo, or Onna dōjikyo— none of these works discuss the value or importance of motherhood or mothering in any explicit way. On the occasions when mothers appear in early instructional manuals, they tend to be cast as exemplars, objects of veneration in the form of filial devotion. This is emphasized in texts like Onna rongo (Analects for Women) and in other texts translated more or less directly from the Chinese. For instance, one exemplary mother who appears in instructional texts for women throughout the Tokugawa period is Mencius’s mother. As the Onna chōhōki puts it: In ancient China there was a sage called Mencius whose mother was extremely wise. When Mencius was young, she [moved house] three times to get away from neighbors [whom she thought to be bad influences on her son]. First, when they lived next door to a merchant, Mencius would play at

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buying and selling. Next, when they lived next to a temple, Mencius would play at giving funerals for the dead. The third time [they moved] they lived next to a scholar, and Mencius studied night and day, and soon became a sage himself.45

The anecdote about Mencius’s mother, which is referred to in many early Tokugawa texts, is worth noting in that the mother’s nurturing role is made manifest through her exemplary actions. It is not she who teaches Mencius directly but she who facilitates his becoming a sage through her own wisdom, foresight, and willingness to sacrifice. Mothers are also curiously absent in tales of exemplary women. Although in Liu Xiang’s original text the entire first book is devoted to “biographies of virtuous mothers,” the same category does not appear in Japanese tales of exemplary women. As discussed in chapter 1, the women celebrated in early collections of exemplary women’s tales are praised for their wifely virtues: wisdom, compassion, chastity, and skill in problem solving, all of which help their husbands achieve their goals.46 In later texts, daughters are commended for the filial piety expressed to their own parents, often their fathers. In these tales, the women are unmarried, and they make terrible sacrifices for the benefit of their natal families, but remarkably, in no collection of exemplary women’s tales do mothers themselves play more than a peripheral role.47 Even Kaibara Ekiken, the Confucian thinker universally and unfairly loathed for laying the blame for all social ills at the feet—or in the wombs—of women, has little to say about motherhood. And what he does say on the subject is almost shockingly reasonable. In “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō,” Ekiken emphasizes the importance of women acquiring the virtues of respect, order, filiality, and obedience, virtues that, it is worth noting, he posits earlier in the text as being desirable in boys as well. But with regard to motherhood, most surprising is the commentary following the infamous passage in which Ekiken reiterates the seven reasons for which a man may divorce his wife. First, [a man can separate from his wife] if: she does not obey her parents; second, if she is unable to bear children; third, if she is promiscuous; fourth, if she is envious; fifth, if she has a serious illness; sixth, if she is overly talkative; seventh, if she steals. Of these seven [reasons] not being able to bear children is a physiological [problem] and serious illness is [not within an individual’s control]. These two are matters of heaven’s will (tenmei), and there is nothing one can do about them, so they are not the woman’s fault. The other five arise from defects in [a woman’s] heart; she should therefore take care to stop doing such bad things and move toward the good in order

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to insure that her husband will not leave her. . . . [B]ecause a man takes a wife for the purpose of continuing his family line, he may divorce his wife if she produces no children. However, if the wife has a gentle heart, if her actions are good, if she is not envious, does not deviate from the proper path of womanhood, and satisfies her husband and father-in-law, a man might consider adopting a child from one of his siblings or other relatives and continuing the family line [in this manner], without divorcing his wife. Or, if a mistress or concubine has a child, even if the [principal] wife doesn’t produce an heir, she need not be divorced.48

According to Ekiken, infertility is not a valid reason for divorce, for there are many other ways a woman can contribute to her family. In other words, a good wife is worth more than a fertile one, for a wife can acquire children and heirs through means other than biological reproduction, and this is entirely acceptable. Compared to later Tokugawa tracts on childbirth and reproduction, which tend to adopt a vigorous pro-natalist stance and which valued women precisely for their reproductive capacities, Ekiken, writing in the early eighteenth century, seems eminently reasonable on the issue of motherhood, granting women leeway to be mothers socially as well as biologically. It is not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that we begin to see a specific emphasis on and celebration of mothers and motherhood. While instructional manuals had always acknowledged the significance of a mother’s influence on a child during pregnancy and infancy, those dating from the late Tokugawa period tend to focus on the mother as a particular kind of moral and behavioral exemplar for her children, one that is distinct from the dutiful wives and filial daughters seen in earlier texts. In Fushikun (Precepts for Fathers and Children, 1811) the author, Nakamura Kōki, emphasizes that women, who are by nature prone to deep emotional attachments, should make a special effort not to coddle their children.49 The perils of overindulgence were grave, writers averred, for spoiling children caused them to become disrespectful and unfilial. Women therefore had to be especially vigilant in controlling their emotions and exercising restraint. This is also where the father came in, for it was up to him to enforce discipline and standards for behavior as well as achievement. As Nakamura notes, “Raising children is a woman’s matter, and so [women] should know that they are important. As the ancients say ‘the father teaches the child two times [as much as] the mother, yet the child resembles the mother ten times [as much as] the father,’ ” a clear indication that the maternal influence over children was thought to be organic, deep, and of considerable

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importance in children’s character formation, for better and for worse. Clearly, modeling proper behavior through practical example—even if it meant denying a child what he wanted in the interests of refraining from indulgence—was the foundation of a mother’s influence, and it shaped a child in a way that no amount of formal teaching could replace. The best instruction a mother could pass on to her child was the understanding that one could only express one’s personhood fully by living one’s life in relation to the lives of others. Therein lay the key to household stability and prosperity. Building on the idea of the mother as the principal educator of children, later Tokugawa texts postulated that all women should aspire to become “wise mothers” (kenbo). Nakamura’s Jokun san no michi (Three Paths of Moral Teachings for Women, 1823) describes the three phases through which a proper woman’s life should pass: first filial daughter (kōjo), then chaste and loyal wife (teifu), and finally kenbo, wise mother.50 The text describes behaviors appropriate to each phase in life. The principle of ken is emphasized in many instructional manuals for women and has its roots in Chinese classical teachings for women. According to the Chinese classic the Laws of Zhou, the woman who exhibits ken “obeys the filial order and serves her in-laws, she respects and serves her husband, she treats those around her warmly, and she loves and cares for her children.” In the Onna rongo (The Analects for Women, a Tangperiod text) “study of craft [weaving and sewing], getting up early, education of sons and daughters, [and] receiving guests” are also key skills.51 However, while these classical Chinese texts speak of women as “wise wives” (kenpu) later Tokugawa texts like Jokun san no michi and others posit ken (propriety) as an essential characteristic of mothers, one that women need to cultivate in order to counterbalance their natural tendencies to indulge their children. According to Fushikun, it is a mother’s duty to suppress her emotions so as not to obstruct the rational teachings of the father about important matters such as inheriting house headship (this type of instruction would of course be directed only at male heirs). In Fushikun we see distinct roles for mothers and fathers within a companionate marriage. Parenting duties are shared, and both mothers and fathers are exhorted to do their utmost to educate their children and cultivate virtue in them. The ideal kenbo, wise mother, or the hōbo (protector mother), is a rational and vigilant alter ego of the indulgent and coddling mother. Whereas the latter is an obstacle to proper child rearing, the former is its foundation, for the kenbo recognizes that discipline as well as affection are needed in order to raise children properly.

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Social Motherhood in Drama and Fiction While the figure of the mother remained curiously absent in didactic and instructional literature until the early nineteenth century, the balance between a mother’s nurturing love for her children, which was expected and encouraged, and her overindulgence of them, which was undesirable, provided the dramatic tension in popular drama and fiction from the early Tokugawa period. In “old jōruri” plays (ko jōruri), many of which had been performed since the late medieval period and continued to be produced into the early modern period, mothers are often depicted as emotionally driven but autonomous actors willing to oppose their husbands in order to protect the lives or well-being of their children.52 For example, in Horie no maki zōshi (Tales of Horie), a play first performed in the late medieval period, a mother not only openly opposes her husband’s plan to use their children as tools in a vendetta against a political enemy, but she ultimately kills herself in protest of his actions.53 In Oguri, a mother who possesses her own income from landed property (chigyōchi) uses her economic power to aid and protect her children.54 In popular illustrated tales (kanazōshi) written in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the image of the mother shifts from one who exercises relatively autonomous power to one whose inherent weakness as a woman makes it impossible for her to protect her children, especially her sons; instead, all she can do is prepare them as best she can for the challenges they will face, and must endure, without her. This image of the mother is evident in such works as Osaka monogatari (Tales of Osaka).55 Set in the doomed Toyotomi camp after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the mothers of Toyotomi Hideyori and Watanabe Kuranosuke lament their inability to see their sons through to their imminent deaths. As women who are by nature “ephemeral” or “shallow of heart,” they can only prepare them for the inevitable but not accompany them there, literally or spiritually.56 For the most part, mothers in these texts are shown to be fully imbricated in and therefore confined by the social and political systems in which they play important if somewhat understated parts. In later Tokugawa-period puppet plays (ningyō jōruri), however, these two contrasting images of the mother—the able protector and the weak incompetent—come together in the dramatis personae of what Sakurai Yūki has called the “mother torn asunder.”57 In these hugely popular plays, many of which are still performed today, such as Sugawara Denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy, 1746) and Yoshitsune senbonzakura (Yoshitsune and the Ten Thousand Cherry Trees,

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1747), both written by the trio of playwrights Takeda Izumo, Namiki Sōsuke, and Miyoshi Shōraku, the familiar tension between obligation (giri) and human emotion (ninjō) is recast in gendered and familial terms, as fathers come to represent and to enforce on their family members the values of loyalty, rectitude, and socially and politically appropriate behavior, while mothers come to represent pure love and unqualified attachment to children.58 In the former play, set in the ninth century and revolving around the historical figure of the famed statesman and poet Sugawara no Michizane, a father attempts to atone for his wrongdoings by sacrificing the life of his son so that the young Michizane might live. He has his son beheaded, and it is only when his wife, the boy’s mother, appears and must be informed of what has happened that the tragedy of the young boy’s death is made manifest through her abject grief. In Yoshitsune senbonzakura, a mother, acting only on her “limitless affection” and heedless of real-life consequences, seeks to protect her wayward son by concealing his criminal behavior in order that he might escape punishment. However, the son’s subsequent valiant act, which involves the sacrifice of the lives of his own wife and son and is meant to redeem him in the eyes of his family and society, backfires completely, and he is killed by his own father. The mother, watching in horror, “utter[s] an astonished cry. Hateful though her son may be, instinctively the mother runs to him.”59 After the son’s true and just motives are revealed to all after his death, the mother attempts to salvage the home and what familial connections remain in the wake of her son’s misdirected sacrifice of his family and himself. Her seemingly irrational belief in her son’s goodness, on the other hand, is proven valid by his redemptive if futile act.60 Sakurai argues that the mothers in these plays are represented as inherently weak beings who can “only” love because they are incapable of higher forms of reasoning. In Sakurai’s view, early Tokugawa plays showed mothers acting on their own initiative on behalf of their children, while in later plays mothers’ acts, though still motivated by deep love and care for their offspring, become futile and tragic and are symbolic of the woman’s and mother’s subordination to a male-centered, paternalistic social and political system.61 This point about late Tokugawa ningyō jōruri is well taken; but if we understand dramatic representations as only one of many iterations of motherhood, the picture looks slightly different. As discussed above, in nineteenth-century instructional manuals the ideal of the mother as sober-minded protector and role model—the nascent kenbo—becomes increasingly important. But at the same time the “mother as protector” does not obscure the

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“mother torn asunder”; the tension between these two ideals represents a deeper ambivalence about ideals of motherhood, rooted in the conflicting emotional connections within the family. If we look to the visual arts, still another image of the mother emerges vividly in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century ukiyoe. Here mothers are depicted not only as nurturers, playmates, and companions to their children but also as beauties whose sexual allure is only enhanced by their maternal roles. While mothers appear in early eighteenth-century prints by artists like Suzuki Harunobu, in general scenes of mothers and children did not constitute a distinct genre of early ukiyoe. By the turn of the nineteenth century, however, printmakers began to construe mothers as one of the many different types of “beauties” who merited representation in bijinga (beautiful-woman pictures). Utagawa Kuniyoshi shows a mother setting aside her sewing to nurse her infant as part of a series of Buddhist-inflected prints depicting the sixteen arhats (fig. 16). Utagawa Kunisada, in one of a series of prints ostensibly on the theme of birds titled Jisei hyakkachō (One Hundred Birds of Today), shows a mother arranging her hair while nursing her child (fig. 17). Above and to the left of the mother and child is an inset illustration depicting a red owl with the character ju or kotobuki on its chest seated on a branch decorated with red pinwheels, both of which were said to be talismans to ward off smallpox. The print thus operates on several levels: it alludes to the long-standing artistic tradition of depicting birds, flora, and fauna; it displays the eroticized beauty of the mother’s body; and it emphasizes the mother’s role as nurturer and protector of her child, reflected not only by her nursing her infant, but by the association of the mother with the use of talismans against disease. Still other nineteenth-century prints depict mothers as the principal companions and playmates for their children. Kunisada’s series Kodakara asobi (Playful Child-Treasures) from the 1830s shows everyday scenes of mothers and children: in one, a woman hangs a mosquito net, a symbol of summer and also an image that embodies both the quotidian household duties of a mother and her role as protector of her child’s health (fig. 18). In the same manner, a print by Utagawa Toyokuni from a series pairing one hundred female beauties (bijo) with one hundred famous places (meisho) in Edo shows an intimate winter scene of a mother caressing her child, who is wrapped naked within her kimono, held against her bare skin. The child’s clothing is shown spread over the brazier in the background, perhaps to dry and warm it (fig. 19).

figure 16. Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Myōdensu jūroku rikan, Taben Sonja (Sixteen Curious Considerations of Profit: Taben Sonja), Tenpō era (1830–44). Collection of Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library, Special Collections Room.

figure 17. Utagawa Kunisada, Jisei hyakka chō, fūsha ni mimizuku (One Hundred Contemporary Birds: Owl and Pinwheel), early Tenpō era (1830s). Collection of Kumon Institute of Education.

figure 18. Utagawa Kunisada, from Kodakara asobi, kaminari (Playful Treasures of Children: Thunder), Tenpō era (1830–44). Collection of Kumon Institute of Education.

figure 19. Utagawa Toyokuni III, Edo meisho hyakunin bijo, Tameike (One Hundred Beautiful Women and the Famous Places of Edo: Tameike), 1858. Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

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Finally, Utagawa Utamaro, an artist known for his archetypal bijinga series, often made mothers, especially nursing mothers, the objects of his eroticizing gaze. In one print a mother lies next to her nursing child under a diaphanous mosquito net (fig. 20); in another a nursing mother forms part of a series of “twelve beauties” set in scenic venues (fig. 21). In many ways, the sexualization of mothers in ukiyoe aptly weaves together the many discursive dimensions of motherhood in the later Tokugawa period. The mothers in these prints protect and nurture their children and are emotionally attached to them and yet retain the sexualized appeal that marked them as a “beauty” (bijin) in the eyes of (principally but not exclusively) male observers. While one could argue that depicting women as mothers in ukiyoe in this way subjected them to an objectifying—and disempowering—male gaze, it is also possible that such images validated motherhood as a desirable and natural expression of womanhood.

motherhood as represented in diaries, memoirs, and biographies Visual and verbal representations of motherhood in some ways established a template for women’s experiences as mothers. At the same time, these representations did not constitute a singular, uniform vision of motherhood. We might ask, then, what of the experience of actual mothers? Memoirs, diaries, and biographies written by and about women are sources from which we may glean some understanding of how women experienced motherhood in the Tokugawa period. Inoue Tsūjo Inoue Tsūjo made a point of writing down her thoughts on marriage in her treatise on wifely virtue, Shinkei ki, but she did not do the same for her views on motherhood. At first glance this absence seems odd, but it no doubt had to do with the fact that three of Tsūjo’s children predeceased her: her eldest son died in infancy, her youngest daughter died at twelve, and her older daughter survived to adulthood and married but died at the age of twenty-four. Her second son assumed the family headship, and her youngest son, Yoshikatsu, was adopted out at the age of eight to a paternal cousin who had no male heirs.62 While her children were young Tsūjo set aside her own writing and devoted herself to their upbringing and education; we thus can glean only momentary and often

figure 20. Kitagawa Utamaro, Furo kachō (Cloth-Tub Mosquito Netting), nineteenth century. Collection of Tokyo National Museum. Image: TNM Image Archives. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

figure 21. Kitagawa Utamaro, Meisho fūkei bijin jūnisō (Twelve Physiognomies of Beautiful Women in Famous Places), Kyōwa era (1801–4). Collection of Keio University Library. (Further reproduction prohibited without permission.)

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opaquely poetic glimpses of her thoughts on motherhood. Others, however, have written a fair amount about her as mother. Okada Tatsujirō and Nagai Torao’s hagiographic Meiji-era biography of Tsūjo tells us that she was an exemplary wife and that she undertook her maternal duties as “heaven’s work” (tenshoku), and together with her reputation for literary talent, she made the Sanda house “the most envied of all samurai families.”63 The short biography appended to her collected works describes her as having turned her back on an active career to commit herself to being a wife and mother, “governing the household in an ideal manner” and “bringing prosperity to her family.”64 Her youngest son, Yoshikatsu, also praised Tsūjo’s competence and industriousness in his biography of her, writing, “My late mother worked and then worked harder. She spun yarn and sewed, and from morning until night she worked. Her hands were never empty or still. Our family was extremely poor, so with firm resolve she worked more and more.”65 Each of these writers has his own reason for praising Tsūjo. Such encomia notwithstanding, Tsūjo’s success as a mother is perhaps best seen in the lives of her surviving children. The older son, Sōen, succeeded to the family headship upon the death of his father when he was barely fifteen years old. Four years later he married a woman from the Nagano family, and they went on to have two children. But Tsūjo’s younger son, Yoshikatsu, seems to have most thoroughly absorbed his mother’s teachings, which she in turn had learned from her own father, Motonaga. In his unfinished account of his youth, Yoshikatsu wrote that at the age of ten, two years after he had been adopted by his father’s cousin Sanda Katsutomi, he rose every day, returned to his natal home, and studied reading, writing, and the Confucian classics under his mother’s direction. As a result of her instruction, at twenty-two Yoshikatsu’s abilities were recognized by Marugame domain, and he was sent to Edo by the domain to continue his studies. He lived there for three years, studying with various teachers. By his own account, during his time away from home Tsūjo wrote to him constantly, relating the daily activities of Sōen and his family as well as details about her own scholarship and writing. She did not hesitate to offer admonitory advice to her grown son, writing in one letter that “[indulging in] kouta, jōruri, shamisen and the like is useless even to common people. You should end [such behavior]. Your decisions are entirely up to you. If you act properly, there is nothing to fear.”66 Tsūjo’s concern, while generally parental in nature, also perhaps stemmed from the fact that she was at the time in her sixties and saw Yoshikatsu as the only remaining descendant—her own family line had

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ended with the ritual suicide of her younger brother—who could carry on the scholarly legacy of her father and perhaps also of herself.67 And in fact, in the last years of Tsūjo’s life, Yoshikatsu was appointed to the prestigious position of domain Confucian scholar and tutor (jidoku), a title that, perhaps not coincidentally, was identical to that assumed by Tsūjo when she moved to Edo to serve the then-daimyo’s mother, Yōjōin. The close relationship between Tsūjo and Yoshikatsu is also evidenced by Yoshikatsu’s role as promoter of his mother’s literary career and legacy during her life as well as after her death. As discussed in greater detail in chapter 6, Tsūjo resumed writing at fifty-five, after Sōen married and she was able to pass on the role of household manager to her daughter-in-law. In 1718 Yoshikatsu edited and wrote a preface to a six-volume collection of his mother’s poems titled Waka ōji shū, which was published the following year. Only months after Tsūjo’s death, Yoshikatsu began writing her biography, the rather ostentatiously titled Senpi Inoue jujin gyōjō (The Life of My Late Mother, Wife of the Statesman Inoue). That Yoshikatsu undertook this work in addition to maintaining his own flourishing scholarly career speaks of his connection to Tsūjo individually, as well as to his larger family legacy writ large, but his work also makes it possible to appreciate the few fragmentary images that remain of Tsūjo’s emotional life as a mother. Most of these come in the form of poems written after the deaths of those close to her and later collected and published. In particular, the sudden death at the age of twelve of Setsu, her youngest child, was a severe blow to Tsūjo. Setsu was a talented girl who was spoken of as “the second Tsūjo” and was much beloved by her mother. When she fell ill and died in 1714, Tsūjo wrote the following: In the summer my daughter turned twelve, around the twentieth day of the sixth month, for two or three days she was ill, and then it became hopeless. The sadness is a dreamlike state from which I never wake. The morning dew lingers on the new grass; who will be the last to vanish, in the end?68

Setsu died later in the same year that Tsūjo’s eldest son, Sōen, married. One of her biographers suggests that these two events, on top of the death four years earlier of her husband, Munehisa, followed shortly by the adoption of Yoshikatsu by Munehisa’s cousin and then the deaths of both her mother-in-law and father-in-law, compelled Tsūjo to retire

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from household duties and recommit herself to writing. These losses, no doubt deeply felt by Tsūjo, also may explain why she wonders in the poem quoted above, “who will be the last to vanish, in the end?” Kuroda Tosako In chapter 3 we encountered Kuroda Tosako in the context of the discussion of marriage and mobility among the samurai elite. Here I focus on Tosako as mother, that is, how she thought about and characterized her personal relationships with her children. It is not easy to use Tosako’s diaries—they are written in a classical style with attendant stylistic conventions and requisite expressions of appropriate emotion—to measure in any quantifiable way the level of emotional attachment she had to her children or, for that matter, to any of the various people with whom she maintained close ties. Still, judging from her narration of (or silence regarding) the events of her daily life, one does get a sense of who and what mattered to her. Like most women of her rank, Tosako’s immediate social world was predominantly female, for reasons that had to do with both propriety and practicality: elite women were raised to avoid socializing with men who were not kin, and husbands were often away on official duty, leaving women to manage family and household in their absence. However, it is clear that Tosako’s relationship with her husband Naokuni was close and extremely important. Her world is in great part his world, which is to say that her immediate social environment largely comprised his family and relatives: in Ishihara-ki, his mother, Jikkōin, and his widowed sister-in-law, Nakayama Suzuko, with or near whom Tosako lived during their years in Ishihara, figure prominently. In Koto no hagusa, which Tosako began writing just after Naokuni’s death, the focus is on Tosako’s children and grandchildren (in particular, her daughters and granddaughters) and their families. Given that family relations are central to both of Tosako’s written narratives, how can we glean from the texts the degree of attachment within these most personal relationships? We might consider first which family members figure prominently in Tosako’s diaries. In Ishihara-ki Tosako focuses primarily on her female kin. She is most concerned with the well-being and happiness of her daughters, whom she refers to as the young “princesses” (himesama tachi). While Ishihara-ki recounts her daughters’ initiation into full adulthood, Koto no hagusa is essentially a chronicle of loss. By the time Tosako wrote the latter text, Toyoko had already passed away, and Toshiko died

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only a few years later. Thus Kumiko, Tosako’s stepdaughter, and Michiko and her second husband, Naozumi, and their children, plus Michiko’s daughter from her first marriage and the children of Toyoko and Toshiko, are the family members with whom Tosako interacted most. However, while Tosako maintained close relationships with all of her biological, adopted, and stepchildren, this was not the case with all of her grandchildren as some of them receive no mention in her diaries, for reasons she does not explain (see chap. 3 for discussion of this matter). Tosako seems to have had frequent interactions with Michiko’s daughters, Kayoko, Mieko, Komako, and Fusako, and with Toyoko’s daughters, Ihoko, Sukiko, and Nobuko. She was present at Fusako’s birth and also celebrated the birth of Mieko’s first child, a daughter named Tomiko. The selective nature of her diary’s coverage notwithstanding, Tosako’s descriptions of the major events in the lives of her daughters and their offspring gives some sense of Tosako’s emotional attachment to her children. Early in 1740, within the space of a few weeks, two of Tosako’s daughters gave birth. On the twenty-third day of the first month, after several days of anxious waiting, Tosako received word that Michiko was about to give birth to her fifth child. Michiko and her second husband, Naozumi, who was adopted by the Kuroda as heir, already had three daughters, and Michiko had another daughter from her first marriage. Hopes were therefore very high for a son to succeed Naozumi, and with this idea no doubt foremost in her mind, Tosako hurried to Michiko and Naozumi’s residence to attend the birth. She writes, “When one could see which [sex] the child was, the word came, ‘Again, the same’ (mata rei).” I could see the strength in Michiko’s face, and I was relieved.”69 Although she is glad that Michiko has survived the trials of childbirth, a sense of disappointment at the birth of another girl suffuses the scene, which Tosako describes no further. Like Tosako herself, Michiko would go on to have more daughters but no sons, and Naozumi would adopt Naoyuki, Naokuni’s then-fourteen-year-old son by his concubine, as heir. The subdued nature of Tosako’s description of the birth of Michiko’s daughter becomes clearer when compared to her report of the birth of the first child of her stepdaughter Kumiko—Naokuni’s daughter by his concubine—only a few weeks later, on the eighteenth day of the second month. This time Tosako is not present at the birth but receives word shortly thereafter that Kumiko has given birth to a boy. She rushes off “joyfully” to the Azabu residence of Kumiko and her husband, where she is received warmly and offers felicitations for “a thousand years and

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ten thousand generations.” Her description of the events surrounding the birth is almost exuberant. The same celebratory tone characterizes her account, some thirteen years later, of the birth of a son to Mieko, Michiko’s daughter and one of Tosako’s favored grandchildren. On the twentieth day of the sixth month of 1753 a messenger comes from Mieko’s residence in Toriizaka to report that Mieko has given birth to her second child. Tosako writes that she is happy but “happier still” when she learns the child is a boy. She hurries off to Toriizaka to join in the lively scene surrounding the birth of her great-grandchild. Mieko’s father, Naozumi, visits twice, and Mieko’s older daughter, Tomiko, plays happily with all the female relatives who have gathered at her home.70 The last birth described in Koto no hagusa—indeed, it is the last event Tosako records before she ends the diary in the twelfth month of 1753—is that of a daughter born to Tameko, the wife of Naoyuki, the Kuroda heir. Tosako reports that Tameko is extremely weak after the birth, and Tosako helps nurse her until two of Tameko’s relatives come to stay with her, and she regains her strength. Koto no hagusa ends on this uncertain note, with the family’s future heir yet to be determined. In fact, Tameko and Naoyuki had no further children, and in the end (it may in fact have been a foregone conclusion, although Tosako does not say so) they, too, had to adopt an heir. What stands out about Tosako’s descriptions of the births of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren is that, to the degree that she expresses her inclinations, she seems to favor male offspring who might carry on the family line. The dull ring of the announcement “again, the same,” to herald the birth of Michiko’s daughter seems to echo the sentiments of Tosako herself. By contrast, the warmth with which she describes Kumiko and her new grandson seems to reflect her happiness at the birth of a male offspring and potential heir as well as her firm emotional attachment to her stepdaughter. Tosako’s close connection to Kumiko is revealed again, and explained further, in her account of Kumiko’s death a few years later. Tosako outlived three of her five biological children, and the deaths of her third daughter, Toshiko, and her stepdaughter Kumiko are described movingly in Koto no hagusa. The account of Toshiko’s death in the fourth month of 1736 appears rather suddenly in the diary. Tosako does not explain the cause of Toshiko’s demise, but she grieves deeply, writing that her “heart and mind are shattered.”71 Although she writes that she had been devoting herself to the study of Buddhism since the previous year, she claims that in her grief her “shallow woman’s heart” can do nothing but numbly follow the teachings of the Buddha.72

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In Toshiko’s honor, she has a copy made of a section of the Lotus Sutra regarding the possibility of enlightenment for women, presumably for donation to a temple. She does the same for Kumiko on the latter’s death in 1742. Even putting aside the literary conventions of women’s writing, which tended to dwell on longing and loss, Kuroda Tosako seems to have had deep emotional ties to her children; this was true regardless of whether they were related to her by blood. While she seldom speaks in any self-conscious way about herself as a mother, it is abundantly clear that this role, along with those of wife and widow, fundamentally shapes her view of herself and her world. Tosako never remarried, and the only hint one sees of any kind of relationship with a man after her husband’s death is her friendship with Matsudaira Katasada, a friend of Naokuni’s whom Tosako greatly admires and with whom she remains in contact until his untimely death. Instead, as Tosako recounts it in her two memoirs, her family was her life’s work. By caring for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and perhaps also by having a hand in managing the many marriages and adoptions that perpetuated the Kuroda lineage, Tosako fills the role of the competent mother and protector of the home. In addition, Tosako seems to place herself firmly in the lineage of learned women writers and chroniclers of elite life, which stretched from the celebrated female authors of the Heian period to literary figures from the immediate past, most notably Ōgimachi Machiko (1679– 1724), concubine of Tosako’s adoptive father, Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu. Machiko’s diary, Matsukage nikki (ca. 1710), which was modeled on the eleventh-century Eiga monogatari, the celebratory chronicle of the life of the powerful imperial statesman Fujiwara no Michinaga (966– 1028), tells of the heyday of Yoshiyasu’s power in the shogunal government at the turn of the eighteenth century. This is the same diary that contemporary critics cited as a comparison to Nakayama Suzuko’s diary, discussed in chapter 1, of her pilgrimage to visit the graves of her late husband’s family members. It is not clear to what degree, if any, Matsukage nikki influenced Tosako’s memoir Koto no hagusa. It is worth noting, however, that the two titles differ in intriguing ways: while Machiko’s diary is written “in the shade of the pine,” that is, under the shelter and influence of her patron and lover, Yoshiyasu, Koto no hagusa is a “thing of leaves and grasses,” an account of the many and varied, perhaps less singularly spectacular individuals who together made up Kuroda Tosako’s social and emotional world.

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Sekiguchi Chie Nothing contrasts so starkly with Tosako’s account of her many children and grandchildren and her complex and rewarding relations with them than the story of Sekiguchi Chie, her son, and her nieces and nephews. As discussed in chapter 3, Chie had only one biological child, a son from her marriage to Kawamura Matsugorō. After her husband’s death, Chie lived for some time with the Kawamura family, until her family decided that her living situation had become untenable and arranged to officially end her relationship with them. The end of her marriage freed Chie to enter into service in the shogun’s ō-oku. There was, however, a high cost for what amounted to a widow divorce from the Kawamura: Chie had to leave her six-year-old son, Takejirō, with her in-laws. So complete was the severing of ties to the Kawamura that it is unlikely Chie ever saw her son again; in any case, there is no account of her having had contact with him in the Sekiguchi diary. The only mention of him comes in a letter from Chie to her father in 1830 saying that Takejirō, at that point twelve years old and known as Tokujirō, has gone into service in a tea shop in Shinjuku. After this, his whereabouts are unknown.73 The diary’s straightforward, factual account reports the circumstances of Chie’s separation from her son, but it tells us little about the sense of loss she must have felt. Chie’s decision to serve the shogun’s concubine O-Miyo may well have served as a distraction from the end of her marriage and the loss of her son; indeed, one might see her service to the younger O-Miyo as a form of surrogate parenting. The Sekiguchi family diary also tells a story of motherhood and loss in its account of the second wife of the eldest son and heir, Junji. Junji was married three times; his first two marriages ended in divorce. We know virtually nothing about the first wife, but Junji’s second wife, O-Naru, ran away from home at one point, and appears to have been desperately unhappy.74 The source of O-Naru’s misery may well have been the couple’s inability to have children: between 1826 and 1818, in quick succession they had one stillborn girl, then another girl and a boy, both of whom died in infancy. The last-born son, the future heir on whom great expectations rested, was sickly from birth and was sent out to a wet nurse because his mother produced no milk. Sadly, he lingered only a few months before succumbing, surviving no longer than his parents’ marriage, which ended just before he died.75 The diarist Sekiguchi Tōemon II spares few words to describe his daughter-in-law, and yet reading between the lines of his account we can get a glimpse of

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the misery she must have endured as she lost one child after another and saw her status in her married family slipping away with each infant’s death. Her escape to a convent foiled by her in-laws, she was compelled to try again and again to bear children with Junji. While the Sekiguchi attained their goals in the end by arranging Junji’s divorce and his remarriage to a third wife who bore him children, including a son and heir, we have no idea what became of O-Naru, who vanishes from the historical record when she leaves the Sekiguchi house.76 While Chie and her brother had few children and their roles as parents are barely described in the diaries, the same cannot be said for the activities of Chie’s mother, O-Ie, and her grandmother, O-Rie. Both women traveled to Edo numerous times to oversee the educations and marriages of their children. O-Rie managed the affairs of her own offspring, and when they came of age and her daughter-in-law O-Ie took over the day-to-day running of the Sekiguchi household, O-Rie retired and let O-Ie take on her duties. Indeed, Junji’s marriage and childbearing troubles must have weighed on O-Ie, whose duty it was to see that each of her children succeeded in their chosen roles. But on this, as with many personal affairs, the diary is silent.77

conclusion The many images of mothers that emerge from instructional and didactic literature, from drama and fiction, from ukiyoe, and from women’s writings show that motherhood was multivalent, and mothers themselves were indispensable. In light of these transformations in text and imagery, we might consider what accounts for these changing and sometimes conflicting images that constituted the problem of motherhood. I discuss earlier in the chapter the social, political, and demographic contexts of changing representations of childbirth and reproduction, in which the “humanization” of the fetus can be linked to a pro-natalist backlash against a culture of low fertility in which population stabilized and even declined, in great part due to the practice of infanticide and abortion. With regard to changes in the broader social symbolism of motherhood, we can look to other political and social developments. The first is the increasing importance of the stem family beginning in the eighteenth century. In contrast to the joint family, in which layers of authority were multiple and parent-child relationships shaded into the gray of superior-inferior and master-servant, in the smaller stem family

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the parent-child relationship was direct and unmediated. The need to secure an heir—a capable heir into whose hands a househead could place responsibility for the family future—became more important (in practical terms) than ever. In this context, the rise of a discourse on motherhood, as well as an increasing emphasis on women as competent family managers, makes sense. As the challenges of maintaining family and lineage continuity became concentrated in the smaller stem family, the pressures on women to mother properly and successfully also increased. In the context of the stem family, family planning was essential. This not only involved regulating the number of children born, but doing one’s best to ensure that each child carried out his or her role in the family. In the early modern Japanese family, this involved not only strategic management of biological reproduction but of adoption and marriage as well. The emphasis on motherhood and the prioritization of the child were equally important, and one sees both emphasized in the various literatures examined here. Reproduction, infanticide, child rearing, mothering, adoption—all of these types of social reengineering of the family were strategies devised by families to accommodate or avoid the ideological, social, and economic problems created by having fewer rather than more children. But these strategies also contributed, directly and indirectly, to the maintenance and even enhancement of the importance of women’s roles in family and society. While focusing on the issue of biological reproduction per se leads us to a narrative of the decline of women’s autonomy at the hands of the invasive patriarchal state, looking at a family’s overall reproductive strategies—biological as well as nonbiological—for continuity over time gives a different picture. We should look at women not only as biological mothers but also as social mothers (adoptive, step-, surrogate, etc.). In the same light, we should see having children only partly as a reproductive process, one through which women could gain and lose control over their own and their families’ lives and futures.

chapter 5

Succession Heaven gives birth to creatures in such a way that they have only one root. —James Legge, trans., The Life and Works of Mencius, 213

Out in the world, there are those who, once they have their own biological child, abruptly have a change of heart, make false accusations against their adopted child, and send him/ her away. This is the definition of inhumane behavior. —Sanda Yoshikatsu, Yōshi kun (Precepts on Adoption), 1732

For warrior houses in the Tokugawa period, the extinguishing of a family line was the worst of fates. Forbidden from participating in commerce or agriculture and supported by increasingly insufficient stipends,  the samurai’s most important asset was his name and lineage. Of all the status groups, warrior families were most strictly bound by the conventions of patrilineal descent and thus could only survive if they had male heirs; if a family had no inheriting son, it literally had no future.1 The plain fact of biological reproduction ensured that women were indispensable in the succession process, yet they were also threatened by the imperative to bear sons. However, the inability to produce an heir biologically by no means condemned a lineage to extinction or a woman to divorce. A woman’s reproductive success constituted only a small part of her importance to her family (see chap. 4); as Kaibara Ekiken and others stressed, a talented woman could be of greater service to her family than a fertile one. In other words, while heirship was imperative, birthing an heir was not. The present chapter addresses how this was possible by showing how families resorted to frequent and relatively unfettered adoption, and it argues that women were central to the adoption and

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succession processes. Women were adopted as daughters into other families, often to form political or economic alliances. But perhaps most important, in increasingly greater numbers warrior families undertook to adopt men or boys as husbands for their daughters and heirs to their lineages.2 As wives and mothers, women helped orchestrate the adoption and succession of their offspring. All of these practices enhanced the importance of women in ensuring family continuity. Building on the concept of mothering as a multifaceted process encompassing both biological and social dimensions, this chapter places women at the center of the succession process. It begins by discussing the distinctive patterns of adoption for succession that developed in Japan, particularly within the warrior class, from the late medieval through early modern periods. The chapter then turns to examine a variety of sources: an eighteenth-century advice manual on adoption; statistics on heir adoption and succession among warrior families; and women’s diaries, letters, and memoirs. This layered approach to the succession problem shows how women—through biological reproduction and nonbiological production of offspring and heirs—were integral to the maintenance of family identity and lineage over time.

the distinctive nature of adoption and succession in early modern japan In contrast to the late imperial Chinese and Chosŏn Korean joint family systems, which were governed by the nearly sacred principle of consanguinity, the early modern Japanese stem family was a corporate entity defined much less by blood ties than by what one might call contextual functionality. A farming family had to function successfully as a unit of agricultural production, a merchant family had to function as a profitable market enterprise, and a samurai family had to maintain political power, economic integrity, and administrative utility. Success, in this context, was defined as perpetuation of a lineage over time, and insofar as adoption could help achieve this goal, it was widely accepted. Certainly, a priori ethical principles of hierarchy, filial piety, kinship, and gender relations grounded in Chinese classical thought mattered, and all things being equal, most families without heirs preferred to adopt a male from within the kin group, as was prescribed in Confucian texts. But in practice all things rarely were equal, and the bottom line was that family survival was itself a virtue, one that strategic adoption, even from outside the kin group, could help achieve.3

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Such a pragmatic approach to succession meant that over the course of the Tokugawa period adoption became the single most effective and most frequently used strategy for families to perpetuate themselves. Indeed, the ubiquity of adoption in Japan—especially the adoption of adults and those from outside the immediate kin group—has been remarkable, and though the form, practice, and ideology of adoption shifted significantly in the twentieth century, the importance of adoption in maintaining the Japanese family system has few parallels in world history.4 In the early modern period, the Tokugawa shogunate issued repeated regulations regarding the adoption of heirs among warrior houses, and Confucian thinkers debated the propriety of adopting heirs from outside the kin group, but in practice there were relatively few legal or conventional restrictions on adoption, especially for commoners.5 Although the discussion of adoption for heirship, especially in late imperial China, often focuses on the adoption of men, in early modern Japan women adoptees also played an important part in ensuring a lineage’s success. During the Tokugawa period, adoption often was used by warrior elites to solidify political ties with potential rivals for power. The Tokugawa shoguns themselves frequently adopted the daughters of allied warrior houses as a way to formalize alliances, especially in the early years of their rule. Tokugawa Ieyasu, for example, had three daughters of his own but adopted an astounding twenty-two more—all but one of whom were born to fudai daimyo, his most important allies. His heir, Hidetada, had five biological daughters and adopted ten, again mostly but not entirely the daughters of fudai, and the third shogun, Iemitsu, adopted four daughters, one from a collateral (shinpan) house, one from a more recently allied (tozama) house, and two from Matsudaira relatives.6 These adopted daughters were in turn married to other allies, thereby doubling the political efficacy of the adoption strategy. The number of adopted daughters of shoguns declined steadily from the reign of Tokugawa Ietsuna in the 1650s, more or less in an inverse relationship to the growth of Tokugawa rule: as they accrued more power, the shoguns needed to adopt daughters less often.7 While adopting daughters as a political strategy was most often practiced by the elite, for all women, regardless of status, the possibility of adopting a male heir greatly lessened the pressure to bear sons. The results of this can be seen in demographic records. Whereas the biological imperatives of consanguineal family systems such as China’s contributed to the well-documented prevalence of female infanticide, the Tokugawa archives show no evidence of widespread measures taken

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to suppress the number of female offspring in favor of males.8 To be sure, infanticide was common, especially among farm families, but it tended not to be sex-selective. Rather, when possible, parents seem to have preferred to vary the sexes of their children to achieve balance, showing a marked preference for sons only when the ideal number of children had been reached. For their part, instructional manuals for women devote considerable attention to childbearing and child rearing, but, as discussed in chapter 4, they do not show pervasive gender bias in favor of males. In other words, even though the threat of lineage extinction as a result of the absence of male heirs loomed large, Japanese families appear not to have maneuvered to have sons at the cost of daughters. The prevalence of adoption for succession seems to have been one of the main reasons Japanese women avoided the fate that befell their Chinese contemporaries. In particular, the frequent adoption of daughters’ husbands as heirs paradoxically made women necessary for the functioning of patrilineality.9

discourses on adoption Given the frequency of adoption, it is surprising that there are relatively few texts devoted to detailed discussions of it.10 One that stands out is Yōshi kun (Precepts on Adoption, 1732) by Sanda Yoshikatsu (1701–77). By coincidence, Sanda was the youngest son of Inoue Tsūjo, and he himself had been adopted at a young age by his father’s heirless cousin. In Yōshi kun, he attempts to explain how to manage the numerous challenges posed by incorporating adoptees into the family group. This was a topic of considerable importance, for by the time Sanda’s treatise was published, one would be hard-pressed to find a single samurai family of any rank whose genealogy did not contain adopted family members. But no matter how common it was, the assimilation of a new family member was not easy, for as Sanda and others acknowledged it could well challenge the interpersonal relationships and endanger the all-important “familial harmony” (kanai wajun). In the introduction to the first volume of Yōshi kun, Sanda offered the following advice to adoptive parents. •

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When raising the child of another, first think of the child as your own and love and nurture him with a sincere heart. By all means communicate your feelings to your adopted child. Keep this point foremost in your mind as a secret trick as you raise your adopted child. Adoptive fathers and mothers should not distance themselves but remain in contact and speak frankly about all matters. If you do not

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hide what you truly feel, your adoptive child will become a person capable of fully opening his heart without reservations. If the adoptive father and mother and the adopted child think “on the surface the child is acting as if everything is fine, but who knows what he feels in the bottom of his heart,” they will fall victim to [the idea that] “a suspicious heart begets secret demons” and in the end it will become a major issue. You were born and raised as [someone’s] biological child, and even you did not follow the wishes of your parents; how much more so the child of another [will do so toward you]; you each should not forget the word ‘endure.’ The child-rearing methods of the natal parents and the adoptive parents will differ slightly. It is best for the natal parents to embrace “strictness” (gen), but in the case of adoptive parents, it is better to embrace “lenience” (kan). It is best if the adoptive father takes great care in providing food and clothing for the adopted child, and makes the child apply himself to the arts. When bringing up an adopted child, you should not be miserly to the degree that you cause the child hardship. By contrast, you should not give in to the adopted child’s selfishness and spoil him. Neither of these is the way to raise adoptive children. However sincere an adopted child may be, if you are living together day and night, surely things will not be tranquil all the time. From the perspective of the adoptive parents, even if some undesirable change occurs, act as if there is not a problem and let it go—do not lay blame. If a mistake is made, discuss it calmly and act to resolve it. Explain things quietly—do not get even a little angry or agitated. All adopted children lack adequate provisions from their natal parents. In the event that their clothing or swords are in a pitiful state, within the limits of your means, provide [new items]. People who do not have their own children do not truly understand the true nature of compassionate love and nurturing of children. If your adopted child is having difficulties, you must carefully examine his friends. Friends who are not learning their letters or practicing martial arts are worthless. Encourage him to be polite to and become close to friends of quality. When these quality friends come over, treat them to good food and see to it that they come back often. Strictly forbid him to associate with friends who are partial to gaming and lewd behavior. Out in the world, there are those who, once they have their own biological child, abruptly have a change of heart, make false accusations against their adopted child, and send him or her away. This is the definition of inhumane behavior.11

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While Sanda posits blood ties as the normative basis for family harmony, he also assumes, notably, that in cases of adoption close familial ties can be created by proper behavior. His admonitions on the latter subject are remarkable for several reasons. First is his emphasis on the responsibility of parents to ensure a successful adoption, contrary to Chinese texts, which emphasize the burden placed on the adoptee.12 In Sanda’s view, it is the parents who should accommodate themselves to the adoptee; they should exercise forbearance and err on the side of lenience. Also remarkable is his emphasis on the need for parents to be emotionally connected to their adopted children. Elsewhere in early modern East Asia, adoption was considered an administrative and ritual act, and adoptees were not expected to have much emotional connection with adoptive parents. Such adopted heirs often filled the ritual and legal role of heir only on the death of the adoptive father, and in many cases they remained in the homes and under the care of their natal parents well after being adopted. By contrast, Sanda Yoshikatsu seems to assume that adoptees were, like himself, young children at the time of adoption and that they would live in the homes of their adoptive parents. He thus exhorts adoptive parents to be emotionally open and forgiving to their adopted children, so that a close parent-child bond might develop. The emphasis on affective ties is noticeably strong, making one wonder to what degree such sentiments were widely held by adoptees and adopting families. Sanda’s views perhaps developed from his own experience. He spent ten years—between the ages of eight and eighteen—in the home of his adoptive father, Sanda Sajiemon Katsutomi. Within his natal family Yoshikatsu suffered a fate common to younger sons: he would not inherit the house headship, so after his biological father’s death he was adopted by and went to live with Katsutomi. After Katsutomi’s death he wrote his treatise on adoption out of gratitude and a sense of filial piety. Still, as discussed in chapter 3, Yoshikatsu maintained close ties to his natal family and especially to his mother, Tsūjo, studying daily under her tutelage throughout his childhood and adolescence, despite residing with his adoptive family. As we have seen, Yoshikatsu’s subsequent achievements as a scholar and writer are often credited to Tsūjo’s tutelage. Maintaining ties to the natal family, while beneficial to young Yoshikatsu, also presented a dilemma. In Confucian thought, in which Yoshikatsu was rigorously schooled, filial piety was “an absolute obligation whose fulfillment might not be fragmented or divided.” As an adopted child, in theory he had to choose to ritually venerate either his

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natal or adopted parents; he could not serve both.13 Yoshikatsu, however, seems to have accomplished a type of dual veneration of both sets of parents, for in Yōshi kun he honors his adoptive father while his successful efforts to get Tsūjo’s work published during her lifetime and his authorship of her biography-cum-hagiography after her death attests to his devotion to his birth mother. His acts of piety did not take the form of the elaborate ritual sacrifices to ancestors required of members of Chinese and Korean extended families, but they were nonetheless public, enduring, and seemingly heartfelt.14 It is clear, however, that Sanda Yoshikatsu’s emphasis on the importance of affective ties between parents and children in cases of adoption contrasts markedly with the opinions of commoner authors of texts on adoption and other family matters. Especially in household codes (kakun, kahō), succession and family survival were paramount and personal feelings all but irrelevant. These codes were written by heads of merchant or farming families as ways to formalize their philosophies of family governance, offering instructions and admonitions to subsequent generations. In reading the extant kakun authored by heads of merchant and farming families, one is struck by the writers’ highly pragmatic approach to succession, especially their disregard for the primacy of the eldest son and the apparent absence of natural emotional ties that might bind parents to their biological offspring. Hayami Akira long ago deemed the dominance of primogeniture in early modern Japan a “myth,” for clearly there were many exceptions to the general principle of succession by the eldest son in the early modern period.15 An eldest son might misbehave, lack talent or skill, love drink and gambling, be mentally ill or simply lazy. Letting birth order and gender determine inheritance served the goal of continuing the family line, but for household heads, depending on the vagaries of human reproduction was risky, as an unsuitable heir might very well squander the family’s assets. Still, the highly conditional nature of succession by eldest sons as portrayed in commoner house codes remains surprising; the codes belie a cautiousness on the part of household heads to commit to any successor who had not proven himself a capable leader.16 In commoner and warrior houses alike, the best way to ensure that a “talented person” would become the family head was to adopt. In particular, adopting a daughter’s husband—usually a man at or near adulthood—allowed a family to choose a competent and appropriate individual as heir, one who was most likely to be able to manage the family’s affairs and ensure its survival and prosperity. It also enabled a family to

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keep a daughter at home and benefit from her labor and natural authority. Further, adopting a son-in-law not only saved the expense of providing a daughter with a dowry, but in-marrying sons-in-law brought their own dowries to their wives’ families. Commoner families could also incorporate nonrelated individuals such as employees into the family in order to increase the number of potential heirs. Clearly, many factors besides bloodline determined who belonged to the family.17 In sum, while texts like Yōshi kun evince an emotional component in family ties, other texts like house codes are almost ruthless in their culling of their unproductive or nonessential members. As the economic climate became in general more competitive and market-oriented in the mid- to late Tokugawa period, even wealthy families were compelled to guard their assets assiduously; this included controlling access to family membership, incorporating those who could contribute to the project of family success, and excluding those who could not. Adoption practices, in other words, clearly responded to economic and political imperatives as well as to social ones, a conclusion borne out by examining quantitative data on adoption.

adoption by the numbers It is difficult if not impossible to deduce reliable overall numbers of adoptions or adoptees from the available documentation, because informal adoptions among commoners and surreptitious adoptions among samurai often went unrecorded. But a sampling of data on adoption within samurai families from the mid- to late Tokugawa period, summarized in table 1 below, shows that the practice of adoption was both widespread and frequent.18 Within the bushi class, adoption was regularly practiced from the beginning of the Tokugawa period, and overall rates of adoption increased over time. The foregoing data require some elaboration. In one of the earliest studies of adoption published in English, Ray Moore assembled a random sample of genealogies, family histories, and office-holding records from 207 middle- to upper-ranking samurai families in the domains of Hikone, Kaga, Owari, and Sendai, which represented the “major political and historical types of Tokugawa daimyo [i.e., fudai-kinsei, shimpan-kinsei, tozama-shokuhō and tozama-sengoku] and four major geographical regions in Japan.”19 Among these families, the rates of adoption of sons rose steadily over time, from 26 percent in the seventeenth century to almost 40 percent by the nineteenth.20 Moore’s central

table 1 household succession by adoption, including adopted sons-in-law, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Type of Sample Middle- to upper-ranking samurai families in the domains of Hikone, Kaga, Owari, and Sendaia Eight lineages within the Fukōzu Matsudairab Fourteen Matsudaira lineagesc Fifty-nine tozama daimyo housesc Warrior houses in Nanbe domain, Moriokad Warrior houses in Satake domain, Akitae Warrior houses in Aizu domainf Warrior houses in Nabeshima domain, Sagag

No. of Succession Cases 207 54 544 390 17th century: 693 18th century: 1,037 (1681–1700): 311 (1721–40): 516 17th century: 623 18th century: 2,018 17th century: 157 18th century: 375

No. of Adopted Heirs (% of succession cases) 70 (37%) 23 (43%) 160 (29%) 130 (33%) 85 (12%) 179 (17%) 72 (23%) 152 (30%) 119 (19%) 529 (26%) 18 (12%) 86 (23%)

No. of Adopted Sons-in-Law (% of all adopted heirs) NA 4 (17%) 46 (29%) 20 (15%) 50 (59%) 97 (54%) 28 (39%) 48 (32%) 61 (51%) 260 (49%) 7 (39%) 51 (59%)

note: The figures in this table are my calculations, based on data from the indicated sources. a

Ray A. Moore, “Adoption and Samurai Mobility in Tokugawa Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 29, no. 3 (1970): 617–32.

b

Wakita Osamu, “Bakuhan taisei to josei,” in Josei Shi Sōgō Kenkyūkai, ed., Nihon josei shi, vol. 3: Kinsei (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1982), 1–30.

c

Ōguchi Yūjirō, “Kinsei buke sozoku ni okeru isei yōshi,” in Onna no shakai shi 17–20 seiki: “ie” to jendaa wo kangaeru (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2001), 5–25.

d

Tsubouchi Reiko, Danshō no jinkō shakaigaku: dare ga “ie” wo tsuida ka (Kyoto: Mineruboa Shobō, 2001), 38–39.

e f

Ibid., 88–89.

Ibid., 98.

g

Ibid., 139.

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question, however, concerned not the frequency of adoption per se but whether or not adoption led to increased social mobility for younger sons, who were generally excluded from house headship in their natal families. He concluded that adoption did not measurably enhance the fortunes of the adoptees as measured in the objective terms of rank and income, although it did provide an important means for noninheriting younger sons to gain independent standing as heads of families within their adoptive lines. Moore’s study revealed general patterns of adoption, but it focused solely on the adoption of sons as heirs, not of daughters. Neither did it make a distinction between different types of adoptees, that is, sole male adoptees versus adopted sons-in-law (muko yōshi) or kin adoptees (dōsei) versus nonkin adoptees (isei). Wakita Osamu, by contrast, addressed these issues in his study of the Fukōzu branch of the Matsudaira clan in central western Honshu in the mid-Tokugawa period.21 Among the Fukōzu Matsudaira, a high-ranking Tokugawa collateral house, headship was passed on to adopted sons almost as frequently as it was to biological sons. Almost half of these adopted heirs were nonkin, and almost half of the nonkin adoptees were sons-in-law. These data lead Wakita to argue that househeads could and did pursue a line of descent through their daughters’ adopted husbands as well as through their biological or adopted sons.22 Such alliances had the benefit of allowing the woman’s family some latitude in choosing—and sometimes later rejecting—an heir. Although divorces of adopted sons-in-law were technically initiated and accomplished by male relatives for the good of the patriline (women could not legally initiate divorce), Wakita suggests that the dissolution of son-in-law marriages in actuality took into consideration the needs of the daughter/wife herself.23 In any case, it is arguable that in the samurai class son-in-law adoption enhanced a woman’s decision-making power within her family; at the very least it endowed the woman’s family with legal and social authority to initiate and dictate the terms of divorce.24 Ōguchi Yūjirō built on but also took issue with Wakita’s study of the Matsudaira, asserting that one must further disaggregate the definition of close kin versus distant kin or nonkin when considering heir adoptions. His research showed that among middle- and upper-ranking Matsudaira lineages in the mid-Tokugawa period, one-third involved adopted heirs. Among the adopted heirs, slightly more than half were from within the kin group and slightly less than half came from outside it. While a modest number of the kin adoptions were of sons-in-law, sons-in-law constituted almost half of nonkin heir adoptions.25

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Finally, Tsubouchi Reiko collated and analyzed domainal records of succession in warrior houses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas the preceding studies focused on relatively small populations drawn solely from middle- to upper-ranking warrior houses, Tsubouchi assesses all recorded cases of succession in warrior houses of all ranks, across time. Similar to the findings of the preceding studies, her data indicate that the number of adopted heirs increased over time in all domains surveyed; the proportion of adopted heirs as a percentage of all succession cases ranged from a low of 12 percent to a high of 30 percent. These percentages are within the same range as those derived from similar studies of succession summarized in table 1. However, the proportion of adopted sons-in-law as a percentage of all adopted heirs in the domains surveyed by Tsubouchi is significantly higher than that found in preceding studies, ranging from a low of 32 percent to a high of 59 percent.26 Tsubouchi also found that as the income of a house went down, its rate of adoption of heirs went up. Son-in-law adoptions showed a similar pattern with regard to income.27 Among families with incomes of between 200 and 1,000 koku, regular heir adoptions accounted for 8 percent of all succession cases and son-in-law adoptions for 10 percent of all cases of succession by adoption; among families with incomes of between 100 and 200 koku the numbers were 9 percent and 14 percent; among the families of lowest income (less than 100 koku), 14 percent and 12 percent.28 Tsubouchi argues that by the mid-Tokugawa period son-in-law adoptions were the “next-best alternative” to the ideal heirship scenario, in which an eldest son succeeded his father as house head. In cases where primogeniture was not possible because of the lack of male heirs (due to absence, death, or incapacity), in many domains sonin-law adoptions were preferred even over succession by younger siblings of the preceding house head, and in most domains adoptions of unrelated sons-in-law took place even when there were other potential adoptees among kinsmen. In sum, previous studies show that (a) at least 25 percent of house heads in samurai families in the mid-Tokugawa period were likely to have been adopted; (b) approximately 30 percent or more of those adopted heirs, or 7 percent or more of all house heads, were adopted sons-in-law; (c) poorer families were more likely to adopt heirs than wealthy ones; and (d) the frequency with which warrior families adopted heirs increased significantly over time.29 As we shall see below, the prevalence of adoption, especially son-in-law adoption, as a succession

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strategy likely influenced family dynamics in significant ways, not least by privileging women by allowing them the dual status of daughter of the house and wife of heir to the house. Statistics tell us much about the prevalence of adoption, but they cannot tell us much about its nature. First, why did families adopt so often, and why did they so frequently adopt sons-in-law? How were such adoptions arranged? How were potential adoptees identified? If kinship was privileged only in certain cases, what factors weighed most heavily in selecting an adoptee? And how did adoption correlate to gender roles and normative succession practices? Most adoptions, as mentioned earlier, were due to the absence or death of an heir by birth. However, a significant number of heir adoptions occurred in families with biological sons who, rather than inheriting house headship, were adopted out to other houses. This scenario occurred most frequently among the lower-ranking and less wealthy families of the samurai class, who lacked the resources to set up younger sons in branch houses (bekke) of their own. Such families welcomed an adopted heir and the funds he inevitably brought with him, much in the way a bride brought a dowry. In some cases, a biological son remained an unmarried dependent of the main family, becoming a so-called heyazumi, or housebound son, but this was far from a desirable outcome. According to Yamakawa Kikue’s account of the lives of samurai-class women in Mito domain in the nineteenth century, such a son was thought of by his family as a “ ‘burden’ . . . occupying himself with piecework as he lived out his life in dreary solitude.”30 Other cases of sons being passed over for headship in favor of adoptees remain unexplained. Any number of factors might have governed decisions to pass over a biological son in favor of an adopted one, but the age of the offspring in question was often key. An aging or ailing house head whose sons were still in early childhood might prefer to adopt an older male who could immediately assume the responsibilities of headship. The physical health, mental acuity, and general competence of sons also affected decisions about inheritance. However, the number of children in the family and their gender balance also mattered, for keeping a competent or especially beloved older daughter at home by adopting her husband as heir might better serve a family’s needs than marrying her out to another house and having a brother inherit. It seems, then, that despite the patriarchal and patrilineal nature of the early modern Japanese family system, the needs of the family as a whole—not just its senior males—bore heavily on a family’s decision about heirship and succession.

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the economics of adoption There were many factors that influenced the decision to adopt an heir. But by the mid-Tokugawa period, for many warrior families, financial concerns played a major role in determining whether and whom to adopt in or out. While families of modest means turned to adoption to gain an adoptee’s dowry funds, wealthier and more powerful warrior families also foregrounded economic concerns when it came to adoption for succession. Once again, we can turn to the example of the Sakakibara of Takada domain in Echigo Province. As we saw in chapter 3, even for this illustrious and wealthy fudai house of 150,000 koku financial matters weighed heavily in marriage decisions, with the issue of dowry funds brought by brides becoming a significant factor, especially in times of financial hardship. The same was true of adoptions into and out of the Sakakibara house, but in the case of adoption securing a competent and viable heir was of equal importance in the decision-making process. It is notable that five of the fourteen Sakakibara daimyo, dating from the founder, Yasumasa, to the fourteenthgeneration daimyo, Masataka (1843–1927), were adopted heirs, mostly from within the kin group.31 Equally significant from a financial standpoint, however, were the adoptions out of the family. In the early Tokugawa period, the Sakakibara were financially able to establish younger sons in branch houses, and there are no recorded adoptions of males out of the family until the late eighteenth century. But from the 1770s on, as domain finances deteriorated, nearly all noninheriting sons were adopted out to other houses: the ninth-generation heir, Masanaga (1735–1808), adopted out six of his sons, and the trend continued with his heir, Masaatsu (1755–1819), who adopted out two sons. The eleventh-generation heir, Masanori (1776–1861), a reformer credited with reviving the domain finances, nonetheless adopted out four of his sons. Most of these adoptions followed the general pattern in which the adopting family was of lower status than the sending family, so the majority of Sakakibara sons went to lower-ranking daimyo or hatamoto families. As a result, the Sakakibara paid out less in dowry than they would have had their sons gone to families of higher rank than themselves.32 In the case of adopting heirs into a family, in most cases the cash and goods furnished by a sending family to a receiving family were a decisive factor in choosing both prospective spouses and adopted heirs. As we have seen, one-third of warrior families who adopted an heir chose

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a daughter’s husband. While adopting in a son-in-law could be efficacious for many reasons, it also made the already complex processes of adoption and succession even more complicated. The intricacies of sonin-law adoption can be seen in a succession case within the Date and Aoki houses in the mid-eighteenth century. Aoki Kazuyoshi (1728–81), daimyo of Azada in Settsu Province whose assessed wealth was a very modest 10,000 koku, had five biological sons, but none survived to adulthood. Aging and in poor health, Kazuyoshi decided to adopt a husband for his five-year-old daughter, the only remaining child with his principal wife. The Aoki preferred an adoptee around the age of eleven or twelve, who was not a close kin relation. As a solution to their domain’s financial problems, the Aoki also wanted the adoptee to bring with him a dowry of at least 3,500 ryō. They attempted to negotiate with families with suitable sons, but they found no one who met their criteria. The Aoki then were presented with the possibility of adopting Date Iori (1734–86), one of six sons of the daimyo of Uwajima, who would bring a dowry of 3,000 ryō. Even though the Date were a historically powerful house with holdings of 100,000 koku—ten times that of the Aoki—they were hard-pressed to support so many male dependents and their families, and they were amenable to an adoption proposal. However, Iori was thirty-seven, far too old to be betrothed to a five-year-old girl, so the Date proposed that he be made a direct adoptee (jun yōshi) instead of an adopted son-in-law, on the condition that he later adopt—instead of marry—the Aoki’s young daughter. In this manner, the Date argued, the Aoki bloodline could be preserved through Kazuyoshi’s daughter as originally intended. But this was a tenuous arrangement at best, and the Aoki turned down the Date’s offer. The Date, undeterred, then proposed a new possibility, one involving an eighteen-year-old biological daughter that Aoki Kazuyoshi had fathered much earlier in life and who had been adopted by another branch of the Aoki family. The Date cleverly proposed a union between this older daughter and Date Iori, sweetening the pot by offering a dowry of 5,000 ryō. This proposal appealed to the Aoki, who countered with a request for a yearly living stipend (daidokoro kin) of 400 ryō in addition to the jisankin, on the grounds that the adult couple would need to establish and maintain a separate residence. The Date did not hide their displeasure at this demand, but eventually the adoption documents were written up and submitted and finally approved by the shogunate in 1770. Date Iori assumed the name Aoki Kazutsura, and within six months of the formalization of his adoption, his adoptive father retired and he

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assumed house headship. Kazuyoshi’s failing health had made it imperative for the Aoki to find an heir to succeed Kazuyoshi sooner rather than later. But the Date, too, seem to have had a strong desire to secure an adoptive family for Iori, in order that he avoid the fate of being a middle-aged bachelor with few prospects. Their sense of urgency is evidenced by their willingness to pay a higher dowry, as well as a yearly “maintenance fee” (daidokoro kin). In this case we can see two principal and interrelated factors influencing decision making on both sides of the adoption process: kinship and cash. In the first instance, blood ties mattered, but they were not necessarily the determining factor. In considering the various scenarios put before them, the Aoki had to balance the attractiveness of a high jisankin with their concerns for maintaining some kind of kin relationship with their heirs. Finding a suitable kinsman to adopt was the stated ideal, but by the late Tokugawa period, monetary gain mattered as much or more than kinship for many daimyo, hence the Aoki’s decision to adopt a nonkin husband as spouse for a previously neglected but nonetheless blood-related daughter. The increase in adoption for heirship had significant effects on the family system. In the first instance, it created a situation, seen in many of the case studies I examine below, in which descent was continued through the offspring of daughters and their adopted husbands rather than through sons. This in turn increased families’ preference for adopted heirs who were not blood kin. On the other hand, for families with “surplus” sons, adoption became an attractive alternative to establishing a branch family or having the unmarried sons remain in the natal household. As costly as providing jisankin might be, it was a fraction of what it would take to set up a branch house, or to support a dependent son in the long term. This plight affected younger sons of warrior houses disproportionately, for samurai were not allowed to seek a living in any way other than receiving a stipend for their service. Adoption was thus one of the few “career moves” a noninheriting younger son could make. The role of adoptee was therefore coveted by and for younger sons, as reflected in the saying, “An only daughter can choose among eight potential husbands.”33 Because of this perceived power imbalance between daughters/wives and adopted sons/husbands, the conventional view of in-marrying husbands to this day characterizes them as weak or at least significantly disadvantaged within their wives’ families. In the same way that a new wife is obliged to unconditionally

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obey her husband’s parents, siblings, and relatives, an adopted son-inlaw was subject not only to the authority of his in-laws but also to the wishes of his wife, into whose home he had come as an outsider with little natural authority. However, evidence of discrimination against adopted sons-in-law in the Tokugawa period is scarce, and it is not clear if the majority of in-marrying husbands were in fact treated poorly. Yamakawa Kikue proposed the following scenario when describing marriage and divorce in Mito Domain: “Unlike the case of brides, vulnerable to replacement because of the imbalance in the numbers of marriageable men and women, the existence of a large pool of candidates for adoption did not lead to frequent divorce of adopted sons. Since only a man could serve as head of the house, were dissatisfaction with an adopted son to lead to his divorce, both sides would lose. The man would no longer have a stipend, and, without an heir, the family’s position in the domain would also be jeopardized.”34 While Yamakawa takes the perspective of the adopting house, from the adopted son’s point of view, once married and free of the competition from other suitors, the disadvantages of his position would be counterbalanced by the security provided by his wife’s family’s need for an heir. Still, as we have seen, divorce and remarriage were frequent, so there seem to have been few obstacles—perhaps fewer in samurai families than in commoner ones—to prevent a woman from remarrying after the death of her spouse or the dissolution of her marriage, even to an in-marrying husband and heir.35 Even in the best cases, the situation of an adopted sonin-law must have been quite similar to that of the typical bride marrying into her husband’s house, with all the expectations, demands, and anxieties that came with that often unenviable role. Considering the paradoxical plight of the in-marrying son-in-law compels us to investigate the experience of living in families with adopted offspring. Such families were obliged to assimilate numerous members, many of whom were unrelated by blood. Who within the family organized and directed adoptions and marriages? Male house heads certainly had the ultimate authority, but did wives and daughters also have a say in the process? Recalling Sanda Yoshikatsu’s emphasis on close parent-child relations, what can we discern about the affective ties that bound adoptees and their adoptive families? Given the frequency of adoption, was being adopted at all exceptional, or was it simply a fact of life in most families? To consider these questions, we must turn to a more personal form of history.

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adoption, marriage, and lineage in women’s writings and women’s lives in the mid- to late tokugawa period The lives of women writers, especially those of the samurai class, tend to be better preserved in the documentary record than are those of their less literate commoner counterparts. Standard published lineages of warrior houses rarely contain any information about wives and daughters beyond their families of origin. The family lives of women writers, however, are more amply documented. Literate women themselves wrote about the details of family life, allowing us some insight into the key roles women played in the succession process as they crafted their own roles as spouses and also as adoptees, arranged their children’s marriages and, in some cases, adoptions, and maintained ties with their natal and adoptive families. Looking more closely at individual lives as chronicled in biographies, diaries, and memoirs not only shows how important adoption was to ensure succession, but also how central women were in the process of lineage management. Inoue Tsūjo Tsūjo was widely praised as a good wife and a wise, caring, and hardworking mother of five children, whose literary legacy was preserved and promoted by her offspring. Yet she wrote little about her own family affairs. Her extant writings deal only obliquely with her family life, so her attitudes toward succession and lineage must be gleaned from her actions and the words of others rather than from her own accounts. The sources make it clear that whatever Tsūjo herself may have thought about succession, in both her natal and married families adoption was crucial for maintaining the family line. We know from recorded lineages and extant accounts that in Tsūjo’s natal and married families succession was tenuous and lineages fragile. Tsūjo herself had witnessed the extinction of the Inoue family line when her eldest brother died and her younger brother undertook forced seppuku in the wake of a scandalous relationship with an unsuitable woman.36 As we have seen, only two of Tsūjo’s five children survived to later adulthood. Tsūjo’s second son, Sōen, succeeded to the Sanda family headship on his father Munehisa’s death in 1710. Later that same year, Yoshikatsu, author of Yōshi kun, was adopted by Munehisa’s cousin Sanda Katsutomi.37

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The cross-cutting interrelationship of bloodline, formal lineage (or name), and parent-child ties is evident in the extended Inoue, Sanda, and Noma clans. Tsūjo’s husband Munehisa inherited family headship from his father, but his two younger brothers were adopted out to other families and two sisters married and left home. It is not clear whether Munehisa’s brothers’ adoptive families were kin. Two of Tsūjo’s grandsons—Sōen’s son Masanoshin and Yoshikatsu’s son Muneyoshi— seem to have been adopted from the Saitō house, although the purpose of those adoptions is not clear, because both Sōen and Yoshikatsu had biological sons as well. More important, while Munehisa passed branch headship directly on to his son Sōen, in the previous generation succession in the main branch of the Sanda family would not have been possible without adoption. Munehisa’s only paternal uncle and the primary heir, Denzaemon, had an older son, Jirōbei, but the latter appears to have died before succeeding to the family headship. The second son, Denzaemon II, succeeded to the headship but for unknown reasons did not marry, nor did he have children, instead adopting his nephew Noma Katsutomi, son of his sister. Katsutomi only had two daughters and subsequently adopted Sanda Yoshikatsu, whom he later married to his daughter. His other daughter married her first cousin Noma Masanojō, a union that defied what seems to have been a general practice of marrying in distant or nonkin rather than close relations. In this way, the Sanda family preserved patrilineal descent and family name over several generations, but in terms of bloodline their heirs were equally of the Noma family, tracing their descent not to the eldest son and heir but to the only daughter of Sanda Kazumasa. In other words, through marriage and adoption, not one but two lineages continued successfully—the public, patrilineal “name” of the Sanda and the private, matrilineal bloodline of the Noma. While the Noma and Sanda lineages continued, that of the Inoue ended. In all three families, kinship failed in matters of succession, and adoption became not so much a choice but a necessity. Paradoxically, and in spite of its failure as a lineage, it was the Inoue family history that survived best, preserved in the writings and records of their prodigiously talented daughter and mother, Tsūjo. The fate of the Sanda, Noma, and Inoue families underscores just how unpredictable the survival of “name” and reputation could be and how women’s actions behind the scenes—so often absent from the historical record—did much to enable a family’s survival and success.

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Kuroda Tosako Kuroda Tosako’s written accounts, unlike Inoue Tsūjo’s, give insight into women’s roles in both the adoption and succession processes. Like the Inoue and Sanda families, the Kuroda clan only survived through strategic adoptions and marriages. Naokuni himself was adopted as heir to his maternal Kuroda grandfather, and Tosako was the adopted daughter of Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and his wife Sadako. Yoshiyasu and Sadako had four other daughters of their own (including Tosako’s niece Orii Eiko, whom the Yanagisawa adopted), and two sons, so their reason for adopting Tosako clearly did not have to do with worries over succession. Rather, the Yanagisawa, like many other powerful warrior families—most notably, the shogunal house—adopted a daughter of allies to consolidate political ties. In Tosako’s case it seems most likely that her adoption solidified the relationship between Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, with the latter accepting the daughter of a loyal retainer of the former as a way of deepening the bonds between the two men and their lineages. The benefits of adoption for Tosako and her family were clear: Tosako could make a much better marriage if she were the adopted daughter of Yanagisawa, one of the most powerful men in the land. For the Yanagisawa, the returns on the adoption investment were less clearcut, although they could be sure Tosako would marry well, and through her marriage the Yanagisawa could extend their influence via her spouse’s family. Indeed, once married, Tosako’s connections through her adoptive family aided her husband Naokuni’s political career and enhanced his ties to high-ranking officials within the shogunate, but they also tied the Kuroda and their allies more firmly into a web of obligation that radiated out from the Yanagisawa family. Just as it did for Tosako and Naokuni themselves, adoption— especially of in-marrying sons-in-law—proved crucial for maintaining the integrity and prosperity of the Kuroda family into the next several generations. This was in great part due to the propensity of Kuroda heirs to bear many daughters but few sons. Naokuni and Tosako had three surviving daughters—Toshiko, Michiko, and Toyoko—and no sons, although Naokuni had two daughters and a son, Naoyuki, with a concubine (sokushitsu) (see chart 2).38 However, rather than make Naoyuki his heir, Naokuni adopted his nephew, Naomoto, the son of a younger sister, as an in-marrying husband for his daughter Michiko.39 All of Michiko’s sisters eventually married well.40 But the heir Naomoto and

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Michiko had been married five years and had only one daughter, Kayoko, when Naomoto died at the age of twenty-one. Only two scant months after the death of Naomoto, Naokuni adopted another son-inlaw and husband for Michiko, this time from outside the kin group. The new son-in-law was from the Honda family, but he took the name Kuroda Naozumi when he was installed as the Kuroda heir. Unfortunately, for the purposes of succession by biological offspring, Naozumi and Michiko continued the family trend, producing five daughters and no sons. In addition to his children with Michiko, Naozumi had two daughters with one concubine and three sons with another.41 However, when it was time to choose an heir, Naozumi, like his adoptive father, Naokuni, bypassed his eldest son by birth and instead adopted Naokuni’s aforementioned son by a concubine, Naoyuki (his wife Michiko’s half brother), as his heir. He also adopted Kayoko, Michiko’s daughter with the late Naomoto, and Kayoko subsequently married into the Honda family, from whom Naozumi himself had been adopted. All Naozumi’s other biological daughters were adopted or married into daimyo houses. Naoyuki, Naozumi’s adopted heir, in turn adopted his adoptive father Naozumi’s son by a concubine, who took the name Naohiro (to Naoyuki, this was his nephew, his half sister’s son) as his heir. The simplicity of the standard genealogical chart is wholly insufficient to reflect the complex interrelations of the Kuroda family lineage in the eighteenth century. Again, we can see that for several generations succession ran not through sons but through descendants of Naokuni’s daughter Michiko. However, in the Kuroda’s case, the bloodline was as fragmented as succession to the family name and headship. Naokuni adopted two successive sons-in-law as his heirs, one kin and one not, and in subsequent generations adopted sons-in-law adopted their fathers’ biological sons by concubines as their heirs, thus preserving the family name and the idea of kinship, although actual blood relations were weak or nonexistent. In fact, in eleven generations of Kuroda househeads over more than one hundred years, only once did heirship pass directly from father to biological son. Because of the frequent intercession of nonkin adopted sons-in-law, by the end of the eighteenth century the successive Kuroda male heirs were bound less by bloodline than by carefully constructed affiliations that were equal parts adoption and marriage.42 In spite of, or perhaps because of, the highly constructed nature of kin relations in her marital family, Tosako did not seem to favor biological over adopted offspring or stepchildren in describing her relationships

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with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. After Naokuni’s death, which was a severe blow to Tosako’s well-being, she explains that thoughts of Kumiko, Naoyuki’s daughter with a concubine, who was then a young child, helped ease the sadness she felt after the loss of her husband: “She stood behind me. . . . I had only to think of her and I was able to keep on living day to day.”43 Far from being a reminder of her husband’s “other” family, Kumiko was for Tosako a treasured connection to Naokuni’s memory. And when Kumiko fell ill in 1742, Tosako went to nurse her, praying fervently “to the Buddhas and the gods (kami),” but to no avail. When Kumiko died, Tosako wrote, “My heart goes dark.” She memorialized Kumiko in the same way she did her biological daughter Toshiko, even having the same section from the Lotus Sutra copied in Kumiko’s honor. Just as a good wife was expected not only to tolerate, but to welcome her husband’s mistresses and their children, a good mother was not to discriminate against adopted children. In this respect Tosako adhered to the teachings of the day. She seemed to accept without question the authority of her adopted son Naozumi once he assumed the family headship. She went to his residence to see him off when he departed for his domain or on official duty and welcomed him back upon his return to the capital, and she consulted with him about important family matters. Naozumi, in turn, was a capable family head, who by the end of Koto no hagusa had attained the position of Osaka kabanyaku, which placed him in charge of the defense of Osaka Castle.44 If Tosako had a preference for Naokuni’s biological son Naoyuki as heir, or if she regarded Naozumi as a “caretaker” heir only until Naoyuki came of age, she did not reveal it in writing. Neither of these cases seems likely, however, for at the time of Tosako’s death Naoyuki was nearly thirty years old and Naozumi had not yet passed on the house headship to him. At the same time that she focused on succession within the Kuroda house, however, Tosako maintained ties to her adoptive and natal families. Throughout her life she attended memorial services for Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu and his wife Sadako, and she maintained close contact with her adoptive brother, the Yanagisawa heir Yoshisato. She also took her family members on visits to the various Yanagisawa residences, especially their lower residence (shimo yashiki), with its elaborate gardens, full of fireflies in summer and perfect for viewing the changing leaves in autumn.45 Her ties to her natal family, the Orii, were somewhat more distant, but given that Tosako was adopted as a child, it is significant that she maintained them and made note of them in her diaries. There

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are three occasions on which Tosako mentions her Orii relatives in Koto no hagusa. On one of these occasions her nephew, to whom she refers rather vaguely as “Orii something-or-other,” sent plum flowers from his own garden and she wrote a poem in response.46 On another occasion she exchanged poems with the wife of a different nephew, this one the son of her biological older brother, who was adopted into the Tsuda house.47 The poem exchange was accompanied by a gift of flowers from the nephew. Finally, she notes that “Mitsuko in Tsukiji,” the granddaughter of her older Orii brother, sent her flowers from her garden every month.48 These relatives, while not nearly as close as the Kuroda, seem to represent touchstones of sorts to her natal family, and her poems in response to their gifts is indicative of their meaning to her. Kuroda Tosako’s experiences of adoption and marriage were singular, yet they are indicative of broader trends among daimyo families in the early to mid-eighteenth century. In records of personal visits, ritual observance, gifts, and correspondence, we can see the ties that truly bound the woman known as Kuroda Tosako not only to the Orii and the Yanagisawa but also to the many families into which her children and grandchildren married and were adopted. Tosako’s writings show how women could and did maintain multiple family ties and identities throughout their lives, ties that transcended name, formal lineage, and bloodline. Itō Maki The lives of Inoue Tsūjo and Kuroda Tosako in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century show how families exercised a measured, pragmatic, yet inclusive approach to marriage and adoption in order to ensure succession. But by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, especially among the lowest ranks of the bushi class, many families chose to exploit adoption and marriage as part of a calculated strategy to increase family income and status. Indeed, according to observers of the social and political scene at the time, such as the sharp-tongued early nineteenth-century writer and critic known as Buyō Inshi (dates unknown), adoption, often for nefarious reasons, was increasing at alarming rates. In his Seiji kenbunroku (Record of Political Matters Seen and Heard, 1816), Buyō denounced changes in adoption practices in recent decades. In adoptions these days people put aside issues of good or bad [character of the adoptee], and they don’t care about the reputation of their family either;

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all that matters is that the jisankin is abundant. . . . Even when there is an appropriate individual [who could be adopted] from within the kin group or from within the social network, there is a tendency for people to ignore this, and adopt someone totally unrelated who is offering jisankin. . . . One can see that because [in these cases] parents and children are bound by desire and greed, there is no end of disagreement between them: the parent does not want to hand over the house headship too soon, and the adoptee wants to succeed earlier. Lately such fights have become tiresome, and so from the outset, in exchange for a promise of “immediate succession” (choku katoku) [by the adoptee], large sums of money are offered; “retirement money” (inkyō ryō) is also offered in this way [to the house head, as incentive to pass on headship].49

Buyō noted that this situation gave rise to an environment in which status lines were blurred: “Hatamoto succession is turning into a financial transaction. Even lowly functionaries, commoner officials, physicians and the like—‘the children of those whose occupations are not on the samurai side’—are entering into the great families.”50 While Buyō’s criticism is particularly caustic, there is no doubt that families forthrightly used adoption as a means of both financial gain and social mobility. This is most apparent in the case of Itō Maki. Maki herself, as we know, was of commoner birth, the daughter of a physician, and therefore just the type of commoner vilified by Buyō Inshi. Still, looking at the fate of Maki, her siblings, and her children, it is clear that adoption was a key not only to the family’s prosperity, but to its very survival. In Maki’s natal family, the Kobayashi, there were four siblings. Maki’s older brother, Tetsuzō, the family’s heir, died at the age of twenty-five, at which point the heirship passed to her younger brother, Kyōzo. Kyōzo, however, fell victim to serious mental illness in his midtwenties and died in confinement in the family home at age thirty-nine. In the meantime, the family had arranged for succession to pass through Maki’s younger sister O-Noe, whose husband Gunsuke was adopted into his wife’s family and served as acting heir until his and O-Noe’s son Sōsuke came of age and undertook both the heirship and the duties of continuing the family’s medical practice.51 Maki herself, as we have seen, was adopted twice and married twice: after the death of her first husband, Sugiura Tamesaku, she was briefly adopted for a second time by the Nakamura family in order to raise her status and make possible her remarriage to her second husband, Itō Kaname. Kaname was adopted from the Doi family, who were blood relations of the Itō, and the Itō lineage for the preceding several generations had been sustained largely through adoption. According to the

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genealogy Kansei chōshū shokafu, the fifth-generation Itō house head, Sukehisa, was adopted from the Furusato family, whose connection to the Itō is not known. The sixth-generation head, Suketaka, was adopted in from maternal relatives, the Mizugami. Suketaka had two sons, but both predeceased him, so the family again resorted to adoption to sustain the house headship. At this point, the records stop; it may be that Kaname was adopted in from the Doi at this point or perhaps later.52 Once Maki married Itō Kaname, her life became somewhat more settled, but even after her marriage Maki’s letters to her parents report details of the family’s persistent money troubles. For Maki and her husband, adoption addressed these problems, for it provided economic benefits as well as the possibility of status improvement. For example, one of Maki and Kaname’s strategies for easing their financial burden was to arrange for the early adoption of a thirteen-year-old boy as husband for their five-year-old daughter, Tama. The adopted son-in-law would bring with him a substantial dowry of 80 ryō.53 As reported in a letter by Maki to her parents, the boy, Heikichi, was the fourth son of Kaname’s nephew Wakabayashi Ichizaemon (thus a first cousin once removed to his future wife, Tama). As Maki explains, they adopted Heikichi on a temporary basis (kari yōshi), for about a year, to see if the situation was workable, and when they saw that it was, the family went through the formal procedures to adopt Heikichi legally so that he could “be called a member of the Itō house.”54 It was made a condition of Heikichi’s adoption that he would inherit the headship of the Itō house as the husband of Tama, superseding the rights of any boy born to Maki and Kaname subsequently (and making the adoption a more favorable option for Heikichi’s biological parents). In fact, Maki was pregnant at the time and later gave birth to a boy, Kinnojō. The circumstances suggest that Heikichi’s adoption was only in part due to worry about having a male heir, for Kaname and Maki could have waited until after Maki gave birth to determine whether adoption of an heir was really necessary. However, as is evident in Maki’s letters, they pursued Heikichi’s adoption aggressively because of an immediate and pressing need for Heikichi’s dowry funds.55 In the end, Tama’s marriage plans turned out well for the Itō, if not for the hapless Heikichi, who disappeared from family records after several years and is assumed to have died sometime after the marriage but before reaching adulthood. This left Kaname and Maki’s son Kinnojō free to inherit the house headship, which he later did. As for Maki’s other children, as discussed in the preceding chapter, Itō Kaname adopted her elder daughter, Nao, who then married a hatamoto

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of slightly higher income than Kaname himself. Kaname did not, however, adopt Maki’s son Seigorō, her eldest child. Instead, Maki’s uncle/ adopted father, Kōzaemon, after the death of Maki’s first husband, secured Seigorō’s future by arranging for a different form of adoption for him. Through Kōzaemon’s connections Seigorō became the putative birth son (ireko) of Watanabe Gentayū, a retainer to the local magistrate (daikan). Becoming an ireko differed from regular adoption in that it consisted simply of assuming another family’s deceased offspring’s identity. Unlike a regular adoption among samurai, which required formal procedures and notation in the koseki of both the sending and receiving families, ireko were not formally recorded in the family registers or temple registers. In an era in which infant mortality was high, rather than submit a birth notice and then immediately a death notice, another child would “enter” the family in place of the deceased, and no death notice would be issued.56 Thus the only account of Seigorō’s entering the Watanabe house is in the records of his birth father’s family, the Sugiura. Kōzaemon appears to have orchestrated Seigorō’s ireko adoption in the hope that he could later be adopted by another shogunate retainer house, preferably as an heir. In other words, much like Kaname’s adoption of Nao served as a springboard to her marriage to a man of higher status and income than himself, Seigorō’s adoption was intended to lead to a subsequent and more beneficial alliance with yet another family. Seigorō’s relationship with the Watanabe, whose family he had surreptitiously entered, was ambiguous. Even after being adopted, he continued to live primarily with Maki and Kaname. Much like Inoue Tsūjo and Sanda Yoshikatsu, who maintained a mother-son relationship even after Yoshikatsu was adopted, throughout his childhood and into his early teens Seigorō remained close to Maki. It was she, not his adoptive family, who oversaw his education, and she remained his mother for all intents and purposes. In a letter written to her parents in 1832, when Seigorō was thirteen years old, Maki reported that he was engaged in practicing reading and writing intensively and progressing well, although she lamented that, perhaps because of her husband’s absences, she alone was in charge of the boy’s education and feared that because she was an “insufficient woman” her efforts would not suffice. For a short time after becoming an ireko, Seigorō lived with Watanabe Gentayu and then with Gentayu’s son Shionotani Zenji when the latter was stationed on official business in Edo. But just as his uncle Kōzaemon had planned, Seigorō’s status as an adopted son of the Watanabe was short-lived and utilitarian, for at age fifteen he was formally adopted

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into the Yamamuro house as their heir. The Yamamuro were hatamoto with a modest 100 hyō income, but they had relatively high prestige within their class.57 In fact, it is likely that Seigorō’s houseman (gokenin) status had to be purchased as part of his adoption by the Yamamuro in order for him to become heir. Maki worried about Seigorō’s fate right up until his adoption by the Yamamuro was formalized, and she wrote to her parents in detail about the situation, remarking that Kōzaemon’s money did not cover all the costs of the adoption, which probably amounted to a substantial sum.58 Why did Kōzaemon arrange for an intermediary ireko adoption to the Watanabe? In part, it was a matter of expediency. In a regular adoption among families of this rank, the parties involved would have been bound by regulations regarding status and bloodline, and in the case of very distantly related families, special permits or applications were required. Also, the adoptee was obliged to pay appreciation funds (reikin) and dowry funds to the adopter. By contrast, becoming an ireko was informal, requiring no paperwork or payment, and there was no requirement of blood relation or commensurable status. It was also technically illegal: those involved could be punished if they were found out, although this rarely happened.59 And of course, because Seigorō was moving up in status between his birth family, the Sugiura, and his formal adoptive family, the Yamamuro, it was more efficient to have him go first as an ireko to the Watanabe, who were of more comparable status to the Yamamuro. All of this Kōzaemon apparently anticipated and orchestrated for Seigorō before his death. Once Seigorō was formally adopted by the Yamamuro family in 1834, he finally left Maki and Kaname for good, returning home to visit about once a month.60 Maki wrote to her parents that she prayed only that he would grow into a “person of quality (yoki hito)—that is all I wish.”61 The way in which Maki records the personal as well as financial details of her daily life in letters to her natal parents tells us much about women’s roles in the adoption and succession processes. For instance, it seems to be Maki herself who is the driving force behind her children’s marriage and adoption alliances. With Kaname absent on official duty much of the time, Maki was in charge of most household matters. Her knowledge of the procedures, costs, and benefits of her children’s alliances seems far deeper than that of a passive observer. Second, like the negotiations among higher-ranking daimyo houses outlined earlier in this chapter, for chronically cash-strapped hatamoto like the Itō, pragmatic and financial concerns played a major role in choosing spouses or

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adoptees, to the degree that succession by the eldest son or by a younger birth son might be disregarded if more financial gain could be had by adopting a daughter’s husband. Third, profit notwithstanding, Maki, as chief orchestrator of succession, took into consideration her children’s needs, emotional and otherwise, in arranging adoptions and marriages and, in the case of her daughters, adopted sons-in-law. Finally, it is remarkable how women and men, especially in Itō Maki’s families but also among the daimyo families discussed earlier, seemed to marry and remarry, to be adopted and readopted as necessary, yet also maintain important ties to their natal families. Maki’s life is a case in point, as is that of her children Nao and Seigorō.62 Multiple adoptions and marriages seem to have conferred distinct advantages on women and their families, because women (to a greater extent than men, it seems, judging from Moore’s research) could rise in status, sometimes substantially. We cannot know precisely how many women achieved social status gains of the sort that Maki and her children did. Genealogical records only occasionally provide information about women’s or wives’ families, and these records elide cases of adoption. But anecdotal evidence suggests that cases of commoner women like Maki rising to samurai status by means of adoption and marriage were not rare and can be found throughout the Tokugawa period. This suggests that the family system was remarkably pliant, and opportunities for women to act to improve their own and their families’ status were more plentiful than is often acknowledged.

conclusion Domicide, or the killing of a lineage[,] . . . is not suicide, it is homicide. —Yanagita Kunio, Yanagita Kunio zenshū

The fear of lineage extinction resonated well into the twentieth century, and it is forcefully encapsulated in the words, quoted above, of the prominent anthropologist Yanagita Kunio.63 Yanagita argued that if a person allowed his lineage to die out, he was not only extinguishing a part of himself, he was in effect taking the life of his descendants. Because of this, no effort should be spared in protecting and preserving the integrity of the family line. There is no doubt that Yanagita had many reasons for making this argument that were based in his extensive fieldwork and other academic research; he wrote extensively on the Japanese marriage and family systems. But he also had a personal

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investment in the subject of family continuity, for he himself was an adopted son-in-law. Born in 1875 in Tsujikawa, Hyogo Prefecture, as Matsuoka Kunio, he was adopted at the age of twenty-six by the Yanagita family and, as planned beforehand, was married three years later to one of their daughters. Matsuoka Kunio was the fifth of eight children of a local physician and the third of four surviving brothers. Like so many younger sons before him, Kunio’s prospects of inheritance were dim, so adoption as heir to another family was an attractive possibility. The Yanagita family, for their part, saw in the young Kunio—a recent graduate of Tokyo Imperial University and an aspirant to a coveted civil service position—a very promising prospective family head. In 1901 the Yanagita officially adopted Kunio, and in 1904, as planned, he married Ko, the fourth Yanagita daughter. The Yanagita family was well known in Meiji political circles, and Ko’s father, Yanagita Naohei, was a high court justice with many connections throughout the higher levels of the bureaucracy. The adoption was thus mutually beneficial. The former Matsuoka Kunio gained in family status and political clout, while the Yanagita acquired an ambitious young heir with a proven record of high achievement. At this point in the story, it would seem that Yanagita Kunio’s statement about the importance of continuing the family line refers to his stepping in as an adopted heir to reinvigorate the fortunes of the Yanagita family. However, it is equally as likely that Yanagita was thinking of the sadder fate of his natal family. The Matsuoka had been riven by dissent after the disintegration of the first marriage of his eldest brother, the family heir, who subsequently moved to the northeast to start a new life far from his hometown. Yanagita’s second-oldest brother, like Yanagita Kunio himself, went to another family as an adopted son and heir. None of the sons continued the medical practice in Hyogo that had been established and passed down in the Matsuoka line. The apparent success of Kunio’s and his brother’s adoptions thus had a negative impact on their own kin. And although adoption seemed on the surface to work out well for Yanagita Kunio, according to his own writings and the recollections of those who knew him, Yanagita was deeply shamed by his status as an adopted heir. He felt he had abandoned his natal family and—in line with the stereotypical view of adopted sons-inlaw—he was consistently treated as an outsider and an inferior by the Yanagita elders, right down to the small, cramped space he was allotted for his study in the Yanagita residence, a house that was ostensibly his by inheritance.

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While the majority of this chapter has focused on the role of women in adoption and marriage for lineage maintenance, it has not engaged the effects the system had on adopted men, and in this respect Yanagita’s story is a useful one. We might imagine that many adopted sons-inlaw in the early modern period experienced adoption as Yanagita did. The demands placed on adopted sons-in-law were pressing, and their responsibilities were many, for the fate of the family and the lineage depended on their fulfilling the role for which they were brought into the family. In short, cut off from their natal families and marooned in the often-hostile territory of their spouses’ families, adopted sons-inlaw were given the unenviable treatment accorded most wives and daughters-in-law in the Japanese family system.64 This trend reached far beyond the Tokugawa period, for just as the challenges facing marriedin daughters-in-law remain considerable today, one imagines that adopted sons-in-law, who at present make up the majority of adult adoptions in Japan, continue to struggle within their adoptive families in the way Yanagita Kunio did. It is no surprise that writers of instructional manuals like Sanda Yoshikatsu warned against the problems inherent in the adoptions he witnessed in the eighteenth century, for however common adoption was, it was never carefree.

chapter 6

Retirement

This book began by discussing tales of filial piety, which lauded women and girls who sacrificed themselves for their parents, usually their fathers. It ends, by contrast, with the well-known legend of Obasuteyama (lit., “Old Woman-Abandoning Mountain”), where it was said that elderly women, having become burdens to their families, were left alone to die. According to one oft-retold version of the tale, the people of Sarashina in Shinano Province took all people over the age of sixty—men and women—up to a nearby mountain and abandoned them there, so they would not become burdens on the younger members of the community. Depending on the version of the tale, this practice was due either to local village custom or to an edict from the heartless and greedy local lord. As the legend has it, one day, consumed with remorse, a man took his aged mother up to the mountain to abandon her. Again, depending on the version, he was motivated by his own sense of obligation to convention, or by law, or by his wife, who had grown tired of supporting her motherin-law. As he climbed the path carrying his mother on his back, the man noticed the old lady breaking twigs off branches by the trailside. When he asked her why, she explained that she was marking the path so he would not get lost on his way home. Understanding the depth of her devotion to him in spite of his intention to kill her, he realized he could not abandon her and brought her back to the village in secret. The old woman went on to give vital aid to the community in a time of need, thereby justifying her son’s decision to spare her.1 193

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Despite the wide circulation of tales and legends about abandoning the elderly, it appears that such systematic geronticide did not actually take place in early modern Japan. Drawing on sources from the Shinano region, demographic research shows that, contrary to what the Obasuteyama fable might suggest, older women in early modern Shinano were not dying at higher rates than men. And although the figure of the cruel daughter-in-law encouraging her husband to condemn his own mother to death looms large in the tale, there is no evidence that having daughtersin-law or even large numbers of dependent family members increased older women’s mortality significantly; in fact, having grandchildren and young daughters-in-law decreased mortality, because they served as a support system for the older generation. Of all factors affecting mortality of older women, only having older daughters-in-law may have had a slightly negative effect, because of an increased sense of competition for power and resources that occasionally obtained between such women and mothers-in-law to whom they were relatively close in age.2 In spite of its apocryphal nature, the Obasuteyama legend endures, and the sad image of the old woman, useless to the community and burdensome to her family, lingers on. Indeed, it gains a new valence in the context of Japan’s aging society in the twenty-first century. But why, in the early modern period, did these tales of children ruthlessly abandoning their parents coexist with those celebrating children’s self-sacrifice in the name of filial duty? How could an older woman be the object of filial veneration due her as a mother or grandmother and at the same time be considered a burden to be disposed of when she had ceased to be useful? A part of the answer lies, once again, in the structure of families themselves. In stem family systems, as we have seen, three-generation families were the norm, and thus cohabitation of parents with their adult children was common. House headship in this system could be passed on after death of the reigning household head or after his (or, on occasion, her) retirement. Of the two options, antemortem succession was seen as the better way to ensure continuity of the lineage; thus formal retirement (inkyō) by a household head and the appointment and subsequent supervision of a competent heir was the preferred means of succession in families of elite standing (bushi or kuge), for whom lineage continuity was deemed most important. By the later Tokugawa period, retirement by the senior members of a multigenerational household became conventional among many commoner families as well.3 While retirement for male household heads had considerable impact on the official status of the family in that it transferred legal and cus-

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tomary rights from one male household head to another, retirement by older women was also a well-recognized phenomenon. The stem family structure made it imperative that women as well as men retire from active household management in order to allow the next generation to assume full adult responsibilities.4 For just as a family could not accommodate two male household heads, neither could it have two principal housewives. Upon the marriage of the inheriting son, the mother of the house began training her daughter-in-law to run the household as she herself had, a process that was (and often still remains) famously difficult for the younger woman, who was obliged to obey her mother-inlaw unconditionally. Once the younger couple had children and the daughter-in-law had achieved (or suffered) adequately, the mother/ mother-in-law symbolically would pass the rice paddle (shamoji) to her daughter-in-law, granting her effective authority as female household head. Although one might expect this transition and its accompanying loss of power to be unwelcome for the senior party—and tales such as those concerning Obasuteyama perhaps played on anxieties about aging and life transitions—when we look at what we know of older women’s lives, retirement looks far from grim. In fact, for many women these were the golden years, when they could expect not only to wield the residual prestige seniority accorded them but also to enjoy some leisure after years of hard work managing household and family. In popular discourse and in accounts of women’s lives, retirement was a respite, a stage of life in which a bit of self-indulgence on the part of women was both possible and acceptable in ways it never had been previously. At the same time, cohabitation of the generations, before and after retirement of elders, always had the potential to create tension, anger, and anxiety about a family’s present situation and future prospects, and these problems of retirement and aging likely influenced the popular representations of family life and life cycle.

popular representations of women’s retirement If retirement was in fact widely practiced among families of all statuses, how was it represented in popular discourse? Instructional manuals treat the stages of a woman’s life course in great detail, focusing on depictions of multigenerational families in which changing roles are clearly mapped out in visual and verbal form. Most often these accounts provide a vision of the harmonious and orderly stem family: Joyō misao

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bunko (Collected Works on Women’s Propriety, 1752) emphasizes the importance of a woman’s lifelong “duty to parents” (oya no on), both natal and married.5 Other texts include illustrations depicting younger women nursing infants as they listen respectfully to the words of their mothers or mothers-in-law.6 Another shows a young wife sewing, assisted by her elderly mother or mother-in-law, while in the background a baby plays, the father or father-in-law reads and smokes, and elderly grandparents gaze on adoringly, leaning in eagerly and trying to catch the baby’s eye.7 In some cases women are depicted dutifully serving their mothers-in-law: in a section of Onna kakun (Household Precepts for Women, 1729) on “obeying one’s parents-in-law,” an illustration depicts a young wife with a baby strapped on her back washing her mother-inlaw’s feet as the older woman gestures and speaks with a look of consternation on her face.8 Other eighteenth-century sources show young wives meekly offering tea to their parents-in-law, as the elders sit in leisure, eating, smoking, reading, or taking in a view of the garden.9 Instructional manuals invariably emphasize a woman’s duty to serve her in-laws with the same degree of filial loyalty she would offer her own parents. The family system perpetuated these unequal power relations from generation to generation, as captured by the ominous implications of the senryū, “once a bride, next a mother-in-law.” The Onna Imagawa, in its section on the virtue of thrice following, wherein a woman’s duty goes first to her parents, then to her husband, then to her son, contains a section on “serving one’s father-in-law and mother-inlaw,” subsuming “filiality toward the parents of one’s husband” within the various aspects of a woman’s duty to preserve the integrity of the marital family. The accompanying illustration shows a woman guiding her aged mother-in-law to a waiting palanquin.10 Such depictions of family harmony were, of course, highly idealized, and thus they tended to present a positive picture of interfamilial social relations. On the occasions that disharmony between generations is depicted in instructional manuals, it is in order to serve as a warning: the daughter-in-law who flagrantly disobeys her mother-in-law can be subject to divorce.11 Fictional representations of mothers-in-law and their daughters-in-law offered a more equivocal view that perhaps captured the complexities of that relationship better than did the didactic literature. Shikitei Sanba astutely characterizes this relationship in the “Women’s Bath” section of his early nineteenth-century comic masterpiece Ukiyōburo. In this scene, an older woman, Mrs. A, speaks of her recently married oldest daughter while soaking with other elderly patrons of the women’s bath.

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“What is it my husband always says? ‘Girls are money-gobblers.’ Honestly, he does nothing but complain!” said Mrs. A. “Will she have a mother-in-law there?” Mrs. B asked. “Yes, and she’s still young, too.” “Oh, dear. The girl may be in for a lot of hard work!” “No, I don’t really think so,” Mrs. A said. “The mother-in-law is very good-natured. Not only that, but the groom—he’s settled down now, but he evidently used to be something of a playboy, so he’s a very knowing sort of person. They certainly get along very well, anyway.” “Well, that’s the important thing,” Mrs. B observed. “Even if the motherin-law is a little difficult, things will work out if the two of them really get along with each other.”12

Clearly, the women fear that the daughter-in-law would be under the thumb of her husband’s mother, especially because the mother-in-law is relatively young and therefore likely to see her son’s wife as a rival for power and to punish her with an onerous workload. In this case, as friends of the new bride’s mother, they view the situation from the perspective and with the interests of the daughter-in-law in mind. In a later scene, the bathhouse women discuss the appropriate role of a mother-in-law from the perspective of the older generation, as the seventy-something Mrs. D gives some frank advice to Mrs. C, who has been complaining vigorously about her quarrelsome son and daughterin-law. “Even when you watch yourself, like I do, you run the risk of being called a meddling mother-in-law. . . . If you want a peaceful household, it’s best for a mother-in-law simply to beat a retreat once she’s found her son a bride. Anyway, I know that once a mother-in-law opens her mouth, there’s never any peace. You keep saying you want to die. Well, just tell yourself you’re already dead, and none of this will bother you!”13

The advice to “tell yourself you’re already dead” as a strategy for achieving household harmony is telling. As difficult as it might have been for a mother-in-law to refrain from trying to control her son’s wife when the wife was newly married into the house, once the daughter-inlaw had children and the mother-in-law retired the power dynamic between the two shifted, as the younger woman assumed new responsibilities but also new authority over household decision making. At the same time, the mother-in-law was far from irrelevant: still the senior party in the relationship, she could continue to assert her power over both son and daughter-in-law in various ways that had the potential to cause conflict. For even if an ideal mother-in-law maintained corpselike

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silence with regard to her daughter-in-law, she still might exercise maternal authority over her son, thereby pitting him against his wife. If she was in good health, an older woman could remain dynamic and active in her retirement years, traveling and engaging in various leisure activities while her son and daughter-in-law endured the daily toil of managing the household. And the older woman’s enviable lifestyle would, of course, be funded by her hardworking offspring. Evidently, retirement could be vexing but also appealing for a woman. Although a mother or mother-in-law at some point had to relinquish day-to-day authority over the household, at the same time, with an heir in place and freed from the hard work of daily household labor, supported economically by her family, and if widowed lacking any spousal duties, the retired woman could potentially enjoy a type of freedom she had never before experienced. By the later Tokugawa period, one can see graphic depictions of idealized views of retirement for women in a rather unexpected source: the many sugoroku, or board games, on the theme of women’s life course. In sugoroku, as in the popular American board game “Chutes and Ladders,” the player advances through a set course by rolling dice; chance determines the path along which one proceeds, and achieving the goal or landing on an unlucky spot and being returned to the start both loom as possibilities. While the earliest sugoroku from the late medieval period focused on the path to Buddhist enlightenment—the goal (agari) being attainment of bliss in the Pure Land—Edoperiod sugoroku embraced themes of success or progress (shusse) in the secular world. In games on the themes of women’s life course or careers, which became popular in the early nineteenth century, the featured characters are clearly of the commoner class, and their ultimate goal is not enlightenment but attaining the status of a “retired old lady blessed with fortune and luck.”14 Although many of these sugoroku contain in their titles phrases reminiscent of instructional manuals, such as onna teikin (teachings for women) musume teikin (teachings for daughters), or onna kyōkun (moral teachings for women), the route through the stages of a woman’s life does not necessarily conform to the ideals posited in the didactic literature. As Suzanne Formanek has shown, it is clear that there are many paths to reaching the goal and winning. Progressing through the conventional (and proper) life course, from young girl to bride to main wife to mother-in-law to retired old woman, constitutes only one path and not the most expedient one at that. Other paths, such as becoming concubine to a powerful man, or going into service as a nursemaid, wet nurse, or housekeeper, or taking a position of higher status in the

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women’s quarters of a daimyo household or in the shogunal palace provided more direct routes to achieving the goal of retirement in comfort. Another expedient path to the goal was entering the sex trade, from streetwalker or inn prostitute on the low end to kept woman, high-ranking prostitute, or brothel manager on the high end. Finally, one could also reach the goal by working outside the home in various occupations, from seamstress, entertainer, teahouse attendant, or starch peddler on the lower end of the status spectrum to midwife, acupuncturist, or schoolteacher on the higher end. The lowest position, “from which there is no getting out,” is the blind street singer (goze). Landing on this square required returning to the start and beginning all over again.15 It is informative to assess which paths in these sugoroku are most expedient for reaching the goal and which are most risky, in that they have the potential to send the player plummeting down to a much lower status, from which it is difficult to escape. For example, in many sugoroku becoming a concubine was the most expedient path to the goal, followed by becoming a bride or an entertainer and then a kept mistress or high-ranking prostitute. One could fall straight to the lowest-status spot, that of the blind street singer, from five positions—streetwalker, inn prostitute, midwife, starch peddler, and nagging wife—indicating the relatively precarious stations in life these women were thought to have. In terms of mobility, both the starch peddler and the mother-inlaw were highly mobile in both upward and downward dimensions— just one unlucky or fortunate move from either station could result in great benefit or disaster.16 In some shusse sugoroku on the theme of women’s life course, the goal is to become a “millionaire [woman] in a paradise-like retirement” (see fig. 22, center top). The woman so depicted sits on comfortable cushions surrounded by symbols of her material accomplishments, a small satisfied smile on her face. It is notable that the rich retired woman in this depiction sits alone, not surrounded by family members, and seems quite pleased about it. Her wealth and happiness appear to be independent of a husband or children. In other versions of sugoroku on women’s life course, the retired lady is surrounded by servants who attend to her every need. However idealized and even parodic the sugoroku depictions of retirement for women may have been, by the late Tokugawa period such images of the retired woman of leisure were produced in considerable number and variety and sold along with the vast assortment of other printed ephemera.17

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figure 22. Katsukawa Shunsen, Shinpan Onna teikin furiwake sugoroku ([Newly Published] Precepts for Women Sugoroku), early nineteenth century. Collection of National Diet Library, Digital Collections, Tokyo.

Other texts, however, were less openly celebratory of the solitary nature of a woman’s later years, revealing a tension between the sorrows and the pleasures of this phase of a woman’s life. For instance, comic poems (senryū) both lament and lampoon the plight of the widow. On the one hand, the widow is condemned to chastity, and makeup and self-adornment are deemed inappropriate for her now that her husband is gone. Shiroi wo tsukete yogoreru goke no kao White powder dirties the face of the widow18

On the other hand, widows, like male retirees, could enjoy privileges previously denied them, as implied in this senryū on the theme of a widow “prospering” by taking new lovers. Saru mono ha hibi ni to goke ha sakan nari Forgetting [her late husband], the widow prospers19

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While this senryū clearly pokes fun at the lusty widow, as we have seen in preceding chapters, there was very little stigma attached to widow remarriage, and the notion of a woman living out her life as a “chaste widow,” while occasionally praised by authorities as a virtuous act, rarely affected actual marital practices. In the popular published sources described above, retirement comes into focus as a key transition phase, as a woman moves from the central position of household manager to a secondary position of less formal influence, yet with greater latitude for independent action. One can see in these sources how older women might have felt both sinking fear and gleeful anticipation as they approached their retirement years. When we turn to examine the experience of retirement as represented in women’s writings, the problem presents itself in a slightly different guise. First, there are a remarkable number of extant texts written by women in late middle age, which for the Edo period one might define as the late forties and beyond, when childbearing was finished and the oldest of a woman’s children were likely to be in or near adulthood. Many women who selfconsciously defined themselves as writers, such as Inoue Tsūjo and Kuroda Tosako, as well as better-known figures like Matsuo Taseko and Tadano Makuzu, wrote their major works relatively late in life. The reason for this is simple: women writers and poets found themselves able to devote far more time to their literary pursuits once their children were grown and married and they had relinquished responsibility for household matters. Widows in particular are well represented among the ranks of writers since they also lacked spousal responsibilities. Writings by older women reveal a vast range of experiences, which varied considerably according to status, wealth, and family standing, and in this way, they resist generalization. At the same time there are discernible commonalities in these sources. Although the later years of any woman’s life could of course be filled with any number of difficulties and challenges, the writings by women that survive today reveal moments of freedom and respite earned by a lifetime of work on behalf of household and family. Retired Women as Travel Writers For women whose family finances permitted it, retirement meant the opportunity to leave home to travel. The journey, in turn, provided the more literate among these women with the impetus to write. Travel was a staple theme in literary works in the classical mode. But even commoner women who did not consider themselves writers and who left

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behind no other written records in their own hand kept detailed accounts of their travels. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as commoner prosperity grew and opportunities to travel rose accordingly, numerous women of the merchant and farming classes took to the road in their later years, and their written accounts remain in the form of travel diaries not unlike the sort written by women of the bushi class such as Inoue Tsūjo, Nakayama Suzuko, and others described in previous chapters. One example is the case of Yamanashi Shigako, the fifty-five-year-old wife of a sake brewer in Suruga Province. In the second month of 1792, Shigako departed on pilgrimage to Ise, accompanied by her fourth son, Tōhei, and a servant. She traveled along the Tōkaidō, veered south to Ise, and then continued to Kyoto, Uji, Nara, Yoshino, Mount Kōya, and Osaka, crossed on a ferry to Marugame in northern Shikoku, and visited Konpira Shrine. She returned via Miyajima and Hiroshima, whence she headed home only to be delayed by fatigue, which required a month’s layover in Kyoto to remedy and also conveniently allowed her to see the Kamo Shrine festival and so many other famous sites that words “cannot describe.” Finally, in the fifth month she traveled back home after an absence of some three months. She concludes her diary, which she titled Haru no michikusa (Spring Grass Along the Wayside), with this poem. Tabigoromo iku hi kasanete tachi kaeri Fuji wo mitsuke no na sae ureshiki Days in traveling clothes pile up I return home Having seen just the overlook to Mt. Fuji I am happy20

Although Shigako’s poems are unspectacular, they reflect a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment at having undertaken such a lengthy journey. Other older women traveled even more extensively: in the third month of 1803 a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Kutsugake Nakako, a village headman’s daughter who had married into a sakebrewing family in Sakaki in Shinano Province, departed with her third son and two servants on pilgrimage to Chichibu to make the famous circuit of the region’s thirty-four temples dedicated to kannon, the bodhisattva of mercy. Nakako recorded the details of her journey in her diary, titled Azuma ji no nikki (Diary of Travels to the East). By the time she departed on her Chichibu pilgrimage, Nakako had spent more than fifteen years managing the family business while raising six children. Her husband had died when she was forty years old, and the family

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business had been on the brink of ruin until Nakako built it back up. Now it was time for her to embark on a long-awaited pilgrimage and sightseeing trip. She left Sakaki on the fifth day of the third month of 1803, and although the mountain route was arduous she was determined to complete the circuit of all thirty-four temples, and did so successfully. She then made a substantial side trip to Edo, Enoshima, Kamakura, and Nikko before returning home. A few years later, at the age of sixty, Nakako became a student of the nativist scholar Tachibana Moribe (1781–1849) and began reading and writing classical poetry. She produced several tales and a collection of poetry by her death in 1829 at the age of eighty-two.21 A similar motivation was perhaps behind the journey made in 1842 by Ōkuma Tsugi, widowed mother of the village headman of Matsudo, Shimōsa Province. Along with several companions, she departed on pilgrimage to the Chichibu kannon and recorded her journey in her account, Chichibu dōchū oboe (Recollections of a Journey to Chichibu). She was forty-five years old and had been a widow for four years, and she embarked on the pilgrimage in great part to pray for her own and her family’s health. She completed the thirty-four-site Chichibu pilgrimage in seven days, then went on to the Buddhist complex at Zenkōji in Shinano. She and her companions took the waters at Ikaho hot springs and then went on a “lake tour” (ike meguri) at Mount Haruna for amusement. She also stopped in Nikko while completing another pilgrimage circuit, that of thirty-three sacred places in Sakato. She then continued to Mount Tsukuba, and also to Mount Ashio, returning home after thirty-five days away. Her diary carefully records the names of all the temples and shrines she visited and the names of all the inns in which she stayed, some of which still exist. Tsugi went on pilgrimage again six years later, at the age of fifty-one, making a twenty-day trip to Mount Narita, Katori, and Kashima Shrine and once again undertaking the Sakato sacred place pilgrimage; she left a simple account of this journey as well.22 Iwashita Kinoko’s Chichibu zumurai junrei no ki (Account of the Route through Chichibu) chronicles a journey taken by a fifty-five-yearold teahouse (ageya) proprietress in Shinagawa in Edo in 1860. Kinoko went on the Chichibu kannon pilgrimage with two companions, leaving on the twenty-sixth day of the eighth month and traveling by palanquin. She paused at Zōshigaya in the northeastern part of the city to pay respects at temples and shrines there on her way out of town, then headed north through Saitama, stopping at Ōmiya and Kumagaya. She stayed for four or five days in Ikaho to rest at the hot springs and then

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hurried along toward Chichibu, making stops to pay respects to shrines and temples along the way.23 In the journeys of all of these women, we can see the commingling of worship and recreation, as they detour freely from the pilgrimage route for sightseeing and leisure travel. Moreover, the women make no attempt to hide their additional excursions, recording details of their itineraries in their diaries. Like many pilgrims before and after them, while religious worship and familial duty may have been the initial impetus to travel, the pleasurable experience of the journey itself provided its own rewards. And while many diaries are not much more than dutiful records of places visited and activities undertaken, some women, like Yamanashi Shigako, tried their hand at poetic composition to enliven their accounts. Shiba Keiko, who has written widely on the phenomenon of travel by women in the early modern period, speculates that both Ōkuma Tsugi and Kutsugake Nakako undertook their pilgrimages in honor of recently deceased husbands.24 But she also acknowledges that both women were fairly young widows with adult children who could leave the household for extended periods without fear of being thought selfish. The other women travelers described above were all in their fifties, a time when they also were likely to have passed on household responsibilities to daughters or daughters-in-law. On occasion, a woman’s life course could proceed along its stages regardless of her actual age. This was the case of the noted poet Tagami Michi (Kikusha-ni). Born the daughter of a doctor in the employ of Chōfu domain in Shimonoseki, she was married at sixteen but widowed at the age of twenty-four, at which point she returned to her natal home. She took Buddhist orders four years later and began to study haikai. Kikushani then made the remarkable choice to undertake a “life dedicated to the fine arts” (fūga no michi) and took to the road to study first haikai and then koto, waka, and kanshi (Chinese verse) with various teachers. At one point she followed Matsuo Bashō’s route to the “far north” in reverse. As her reputation as a poet grew, she gained access to teachers and patrons, and this allowed her to live an essentially itinerant life for many decades, traveling frequently until just before her death at seventy-four. She returned home only for relatively short periods, residing briefly in Edo and in Kyoto between long stints on the road. Shiba Keiko estimates that Kikusha-ni traveled a total of some 27,000 kilometers during her lifetime.25 Widowhood and retirement were no doubt difficult and precarious states of being for women of poor families, who were compelled to con-

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tinue working in order to help support their households or who might be thought of as burdensome by younger family members. But in families of adequate resources, widowed or retired women seem to have been free to undertake many activities previously denied them. Inoue Tsūjo Around 1714, Inoue Tsūjo resumed writing at the age of fifty-five, after her older son, Sōen, married and she was able to pass on the role of household manager to her daughter-in-law. After twenty years of bearing and raising children and managing her household, Tsūjo seems to have embraced retired life fully, reengaging in local intellectual and cultural life and immersing herself in reading and writing. According to her Meiji-era biographer-cum-hagiographer Okada Tatsujirō, Tsūjo’s behavior in retirement was (unsurprisingly) exemplary, for she sidestepped entirely the bad behavior and ill feeling that plagued so many relationships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.26 One of the keys to Tsūjo’s success as a mother-in-law, Okada asserts, was her decision to leave household matters completely to her son and daughter-in-law and occupy herself with scholarship and writing. As a result of doing so, works flowed from Tsūjo’s brush during her retirement years. Kikka nikki, Tsūjo’s diary describing her return to Marugame after a decade in service in Edo, was published in 1715, only a year after her retirement. It was followed shortly by Tōkai kikō, which was published with new prefaces two years later. In 1718, Tsūjo’s younger son, Sanda Yoshikatsu, edited and wrote a preface to a six-volume collection of his mother’s poems, which was published the following year. Tsūjo herself wrote little about her later years. We see only glimpses of her relationships with her family through her letters. According to her biographer, Tsūjo seems to have been a loving but not doting grandmother. In the years immediately after her retirement, Sōen and his wife had two children—a son, Kitarō (later known as Masanoshin), and a daughter, O-Miho. Even after her retirement, Tsūjo took charge of grandson Kitarō’s education, and in a letter to Yoshikatsu, who was then away on official duty, she reported with satisfaction that she had begun to teach Kitarō his letters (iroha): “He picks things up quickly, he does things properly, and even though he is only five years old, he has memorized his iroha.“27 Okada asserts that while Tsūjo loved her grandchildren, as she did her children, she did not indulge them but exercised “wisdom and propriety,” even if it meant imposing high standards and

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strict rules; she was, as Okada argues, the archetypal kenbō, or wise mother, precursor to the Meiji ideal. Kuroda Tosako Like Tsūjo, Kuroda Tosako began her major writing project, her memoir, Koto no hagusa, at age fifty-four in 1735. This was, not coincidentally, the year her husband Naokuni died. Tosako continued writing for the next eighteen years, until just before her death in 1753 at the age of seventy-seven. While Tosako did her share of traveling in her later years, Koto no hagusa is not a travel account per se; instead, it records the important events in the daily lives of Tosako and her family in the present as well as Tosako’s performance of memorials and rituals to honor her own and her family’s past. While events like weddings and births, as well as the frequent visits of her many grandchildren are occasions for celebration and happiness, by the time Tosako began writing Koto no hagusa, she had lost her husband, a daughter, both of her adoptive parents, and her mother-in-law, to whom she was very close. Over the nearly twenty years she kept the diary, she lost two more daughters and numerous friends and acquaintances. These losses, combined with Tosako’s sense of her own aging, gives the diary an underlying tone of sadness that is more than a literary convention. In the diary’s opening paragraphs, she writes about her life solely in relation to her recently deceased husband, Naokuni. Even though time moves inexorably forward, she writes, she can only follow the “traces of he who has passed,” recalling and naming his many virtues as principles by which she and others should live. Naokuni, she notes, loyally served the former shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi and followed his patron’s teachings in all manner of things, from the martial arts to literature and religion. Naokuni’s learning allowed him to be “a rare personality,” an exemplar to all people, including Tosako herself. As she explains, “Because I was betrothed to him at such a young age, I look back and realize how naïve and helpless I was. He taught me how to read and write and so many other things, such that out of my ignorance a consciousness of propriety gradually emerged. Over the course of forty-some years [of marriage] he governed our house, raised many children and grandchildren, and passed many lively years. Once he was appointed lord of Shimodate [in 1703], he began writing countless treatises; when I look at them now I grow wistful.”28 In this way Tosako sets up her authorial perspective as the loyal widow of a learned and well-respected statesman. Characterizing herself thus

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was not unusual, for such attitudes would be expected of a woman of Tosako’s status. Her admiring portrait of her late husband perhaps rings truer, however, because Naokuni was some fifteen years her senior and the couple was betrothed when Tosako was only ten; she thus acknowledges the formative role he played in raising and educating her, and she grieves deeply at the passing of a man who was equal parts husband and mentor. As the diary progresses, Tosako must adjust to her new role, not only as a widow, but also as a retiree, as the household headship officially passes to her adopted son/son-in-law Naozumi and the status of female household head to his wife, Michiko, Tosako and Naokuni’s daughter. This transition may have been eased by the circumstances of Michiko’s and Naozumi’s marriage, since Tosako was ceding household authority to her own daughter rather than to a daughter-in-law. But at the same time there were many changes: when Naozumi assumed the family headship, he was given residence rights in the family’s upper mansion in Tokiwabashi. Naokuni and Tosako had lived in Tokiwabashi for much of their marriage, but in the years prior to Naokuni’s death, the couple had been living in Kandabashi, in a yashiki Naokuni had received as part of his appointment as the elder (rōjū) in charge of the western enceinte of Edo Castle. Upon Naokuni’s death in the spring of 1735, Tosako had to relinquish that residence, and she moved temporarily to the Komagome retreat of her adoptive family, the Yanagisawa—the splendid estate and gardens now known to Tokyo visitors as the Rikugien—and then a month later she moved once again to the Kuroda lower mansion in Ishihara, where she had lived in 1717 and 1718. Only two months later, she moved back to Tokiwabashi to live with Naozumi and Michiko, staying there for four years, until her final move back to Ishihara in 1739. Even before she settled in Ishihara, however, it is clear that Tosako’s main occupation in her retirement was what anthropologists call kin work. Family was not only work, however; it was also her sustenance, for Koto no hagusa also reveals a life enriched by the constant presence of family. Surrounded by her children—biological and adopted—her stepchildren, grandchildren, their spouses, in-laws, and even her greatgrandchildren, Tosako maps out in her diary the expanding networks of relationships into which she integrated herself. It is through these family connections that she finds structure but also renewed satisfaction in life that is attuned as much to the present as to the past. Especially touching are Tosako’s close relations with her granddaughters, in particular, the late Toyoko’s daughters Sukiko and Ihoko and Michiko’s daughters Mieko and Kayoko. When Tosako first moved to Ishihara immediately

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after Naokuni’s death, she took with her Mieko, then age nine, Kayoko, age thirteen, and Kumiko, Naokuni’s daughter by a concubine, who was also a young girl at the time. The four lived in Ishihara together for a few months before returning to the Tokiwabashi upper mansion. Many relatives and friends visited her frequently after Naokuni’s death and her move to Ishihara, but Tosako seemed to gain the most comfort and happiness from the company of her granddaughters. Tosako’s close relationships with her granddaughters continued into their adulthood. Much later, in the fifth month of 1751, Ihoko and Sukiko, now grown women, visited Tosako at Ishihara to celebrate the coming of spring. Sukiko had taken Buddhist orders after the death of her husband and spent the day with Tosako, returning home in the evening, but Ihoko stayed overnight, and according to Tosako’s diary the two passed the time “talking quietly, and so I am happy.”29 A few days later, another of Toyoko’s daughters came to visit, and they passed a “very lively” evening; the next day they traveled to pay their respects at temples in Asakusa and Kōfukuji, the site of Toyoko’s grave.30 In June, Mieko visited, having in the interim had her sodenaoshi, or ceremony marking adulthood. Again, there was a “lively” celebration.31 There certainly was much more to Tosako’s life than is recorded in Koto no hagusa, and the image of Tosako as a devoted widow, mother, and grandmother was no doubt carefully crafted by the author herself. Still, although Tosako was not wealthy in the way that the retired matrons in sugoroku games were and she was not celebrated as a writer during her lifetime as was Inoue Tsūjo and others, one would not hesitate to describe her later life as rich. Sekiguchi Chie, Sekiguchi O-Ie, and Sekiguchi O-Rie Like the women travel writers from merchant families described earlier, the retired years of the Sekiguchi women took a busier, more active path than that trod by women of the samurai class like Tosako and Tsūjo. Sekiguchi Chie retired from service in the ō-oku and returned to her family home in Namamugi in 1839.32 As discussed in chapter 3, even though Chie was at that time in her mid-forties, much older than the typical bride, the family received numerous marriage proposals for her, all of which Chie and the family rejected. But far from languishing in rural isolation or retreating into spinsterhood, Sekiguchi Chie, like her mother, O-Ie, and especially her grandmother O-Rie before her, led an active and remarkably independent life in her later years, a life enabled

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by Chie’s social and political connections, made over a lifetime in service in Edo, and supported financially by the generosity of her family. After returning to Namamugi, Chie maintained close ties to colleagues and friends in the capital, especially those with whom she had served in the ō-oku.33 Chie and former colleague O-Hiwa in particular were close friends, having served together for many years in O-Miyo’s chambers. Not long after Chie’s return home, O-Hiwa invited Chie back to Edo, and Chie stayed at the ō-oku for nearly two months.34 While in Edo Chie visited her former patron Nakano Kiyoshige, adviser to the shogun Tokugawa Ienari, who had earlier passed through Namamugi on his way to and from Hakone. She also called on her former mistress, O-Miyo, and various Sekiguchi relatives. As Ōguchi Yūjirō notes, these visits were probably not only for pleasure; Chie also had favors to do and obligations to fulfill. For example, like O-Rie had done before her, Chie served as an employment broker of sorts, finding posts in service for the daughters of friends and relatives.35 Chie’s influence in Edo was highly dependent on the good standing of her Edo political and social connections, notably, those to prominent shogunal insiders such as Nakano and O-Miyo. Such ties could be quite precarious, however, and in 1841 the death of the shogun Tokugawa Ienari wrought significant changes in the influence of many in Chie’s circle. After Ienari’s demise a power struggle ensued within the shogunate whose consequences included the fall from grace of Nakano and also of O-Miyo. Nakano subsequently went into retirement at his villa in Mukojima and died there in 1842. O-Miyo was forced to leave the shogunal palace upon the assumption of power of the next shogun, Tokugawa Ieyoshi, and nothing was heard of her thereafter. But Chie’s friend O-Hiwa gained a promotion to a higher position in the ō-oku, and even after 1841 the diaries show that messengers continued to come to Namamugi, bringing news and gifts from O-Hiwa to Chie. On one occasion in 1843, Chie received a summons from O-Hiwa (known later in her life as Hisao-dono) asking her to come right away to the palace, and Chie departed immediately.36 While the political shift from Ienari to Ieyoshi may have somewhat curtailed Chie’s ability to wield influence in the capital, she nonetheless continued to visit Edo frequently. Between 1839 and 1844, Chie went to Edo and back ten times, spending a total of 737 days there. Her shortest stay was sixteen days and her longest was over five months (161 days).37 Chie’s ties to her Edo cohort lasted until her death in 1865, at sixty-nine. After her passing, the Sekguchi nikki records that Hisao

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sent cash in the amount of 300 hiki and three sets of lidded bowls packed in a white wooden box, including one made of pearl. The family bestowed on Chie the posthumous Buddhist name Chikōin, which connotes a person who had wisdom and thought deeply.38 Chie was not the first woman in her family to maintain an active life into her later years. Her mother and especially her grandmother O-Rie maintained influential roles in and outside the family that did not diminish—in fact, O-Rie’s influence likely increased—once they reached their “retirement” years. The patterns of activity on the part of these successive generations of Sekiguchi female househeads differed considerably according to individual and familial circumstances. Because these differences afford some insight into the constraints and opportunities afforded women from well-to-do commoner families in their later years, it is useful to explore them briefly here. Sekiguchi O-Rie was born in 1743 into a Namamugi farming family. At age twenty she married Sekiguchi Tōemon (referred to below as Tōemon I). In 1744 the couple’s first son, Tōgorō (later known as Tōemon II), was born. O-Rie had a full complement of duties as female head of a prominent local family. Because Tōemon I ran a self-styled pharmacy as a supplement to family farming, O-Rie acquired some knowledge of medicine, and perhaps even of medical treatment, which she conveyed to her son and heir Tōgorō, who went on to continue the family side business in medicine into the next generation.39 O-Rie also had complete control of supplying the family’s considerable clothing needs, taking money from her husband and choosing and purchasing materials from dyers and dry-goods houses in nearby Kanagawa.40 She did manual labor in the farm fields, cutting grass and harvesting barley, sometimes accompanied by her sons and always by servants, whose labor she directed. O-Rie also managed the household’s social life, hosting guests and going out herself with some frequency to nearby places like Edo, Tsurumi, Kawasaki, Fujisawa, and Kanagawa.41 In 1792 Sekiguchi Tōemon I died after a brief illness. At the time of her husband’s death, O-Rie was fifty-one years old; the couple had been married for thirty years, and their eldest son, Tōgorō, was twenty-eight years old and unmarried. However, shortly after his father’s death Tōgorō married O-Ie, a young woman of eighteen from the neighboring village of Murauchi whose family were acquaintances of the Sekiguchi. By 1799, according to local temple records, the Sekiguchi household consisted of six persons: Tōgorō, thirty-five; O-Ie, twenty-four; O-Rie, fifty-seven; and two daughters of Tōgorō and O-Ie, Shige, five, and Chie,

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three. A thirteen-year-old servant named Sayo also lived with the family. O-Ie subsequently bore a third daughter, O-Mitsu, in 1800, then in 1802 the eldest son, Junji, and in 1807 the second son, Kakichi.42 As discussed in previous chapters, the family’s involvement in their children’s educations and employment by no means ended when they left the Sekiguchi household. Money, clothing, food, gifts, and other necessary items flowed steadily from Namamugi to Edo, and occasionally gifts came back in return.43 Notably, over several generations the manager of these transactions, and the person who physically conveyed this lifeline of cash and goods from the Sekiguchi home to the children in the capital, was the senior woman of the household, the retired matriarch. In the first generation of Sekiguchi headmen and diary keepers, this was Tōemon I’s widow, O-Rie, Chie’s grandmother. O-Rie was the family member who took charge of seeing the children off, handling their food and clothing stipends, providing their necessary personal goods, and, often, personally delivering all this to the children in their places of work or study. During the early years in which Chie and her sister O-Shige were in service and Junji was in school in Edo, O-Rie journeyed to see them with remarkable frequency—twenty-one times in 1806, twenty-two times in 1807, forty-seven times in 1808, thirty-nine times in 1810, and fortyseven times in 1811; thereafter her visits tailed off to five in 1812 and two in 1813.44 In this way, O-Rie was the “face” of the Sekiguchi family to the employers and teachers of the Sekiguchi children in Edo.45 Why was it that O-Rie took charge of these responsibilities? In great part, it was because O-Rie was retired. While her daughter-in-law O-Ie was tethered to Namamugi, fully occupied taking care of the children still at home and accomplishing the myriad tasks involved in running farm, business, and household, just as her mother-in-law had done for many years, O-Rie herself had the latitude not only to travel and conduct the family business of provisioning her grandchildren in Edo but also to engage in establishing and extending her own personal and businessrelated social networks. In these endeavors, O-Rie enjoyed the full support of her family, financial and otherwise. As Nagashima Junko points out, upon her retirement O-Rie received a regular allowance (kozukai) from her son for her daily necessities, and she also was given separate and very large sums of money to fund her extensive travels, trips to Edo to tend to her grandchildren and sightseeing and other side trips. Over the years, O-Rie put her Edo contacts to good practical use, securing positions in service for her female relatives and daughters of family friends as well as favorable connections for her grandsons. She also exhibited

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considerable acumen in financial matters, craftily saving her residual allowance and travel funds to start her own moneylending business— with all profits redounding to herself. The dimensions of O-Rie’s independent business endeavors is revealed in the Sekiguchi nikki only after 1814, when she fell ill and was temporarily unable to handle her own affairs; when son and heir Tōgorō/Tōemon II began to manage her finances, he recorded in detail her expenses and her considerable profits.46 Because O-Rie’s illness rendered her unable to travel for a time, around 1814 her daughter-in-law O-Ie took up the duties of maintaining the children in Edo. At this point her excursions out of Namamugi, which in preceding years had been negligible, increased significantly. As O-Ie’s mobility grew, so did her allocation of spending money from the family. However, neither her frequency of travel nor her allowance ever matched those of her mother-in-law.47 And while O-Rie’s independent income may have declined after her illness, her quality of life seems not to have suffered. Once she recovered, her working visits to Edo ceased, but she began to travel more locally, going frequently on mountain excursions and hot springs visits. O-Ie occasionally joined her motherin-law on these excursions, but it was only after O-Rie’s death in 1836, when O-Ie was sixty years old, that she took an extended trip, a monthlong pilgrimage to Zenkōji in Shinano. This is the farthest O-Ie ever ventured, and it is notable that she did not undertake such a journey until her mother-in-law died and she had a daughter-in-law at home to manage the household. For by 1836 O-Ie and Tōemon II’s eldest son, Tōsaku (later Tōemon III), had been married for five years and his wife O-Toku had assumed the status of household manager. Still O-Ie appears not to have had the appetite for travel that O-Rie did; whether from illness or disinclination, she did not travel at all between 1853 and her death in 1861. O-Toku, for her part, continued the pattern of staying close to home during her tenure as female household head, traveling only a few times back to her natal home in Kanagawa.48 In sum, it seems that women in the Sekiguchi family did not travel much at all while they were responsible for running the household and raising children; once retired they could and did travel more often on family business, but they did not travel extensively for pleasure until their mothers-in-law were deceased and their own housework burden was passed on to their daughters-in-law.49 O-Rie was perhaps the most blessed by circumstance, but still, given the burden of children and household labor, she did not start traveling until her son and O-Ie married. At that point O-Ie assumed household headship almost immedi-

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ately, and because O-Rie was away so frequently on family business, O-Ie had a heavy burden of labor and household management, and she only began leaving the house in 1814 when O-Rie fell ill. At this point O-Ie was thirty-eight years old, and though her excursions increased dramatically in the following years, for the most part she traveled on family business, to attend to her children. And because her mother-inlaw O-Rie was now also at home and in need of attention, O-Ie did not have anything resembling leisure time. Chie, for her part, had no children to care for or supervise, and after her return to Namamugi her time seems to have been more or less her own. As Nagashima shows, women did become freer once household labor was done, but the financial concerns of the family also impinged on their autonomy, and responsibilities within families changed independently and in ways not subject to women’s control. Freedom of movement was thus contingent and responsive to context.50 Itō Maki Itō Maki possessed neither the wealth of the Sekiguchi nor the status of the Kuroda or the Inoue, and for her a retirement of leisure seems to have been elusive. Maki wrote toward the end of her life that her one desire was to have a competent daughter to whom she might pass on some of the housework so “things can get a little easier.”51 However, this goal was late in arriving. Because her youngest son, Kinnojō, was born when Maki was forty, she spent a good part of her fifties, what might have been her prime retirement years, supervising his education and marriage.52 Kinnojō’s education was a particular challenge and evinces Maki’s continued concern with guiding her family and children on a path of upward mobility. At age fourteen Kinnojō entered the Shoheizaka, the shogunate’s Confucian academy, which was established to educate the sons of shogunal retainers and was a noted vehicle for upward mobility within the otherwise static bureaucratic ranks. The students were classified by rank and level of education, and although the quality of education at Shōheizaka may not have been better than that attainable at any number of private academies, time spent there served, much like adoption, to advance a young man’s prospects for attaining an official appointment.53 Within the Shōheizaka, exams were required of all students in order to advance, but they were not linked to official appointment in the manner of the Chinese imperial examination system. Maki’s letters show her close monitoring of and anxiety over the progress of

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Kinnojō’s course of study and his results on exams from the time he entered the Shōheizaka as a teenager. Her letters to her parents are full of details about the Shōheizaka system: exams, she noted, covered both scholarship and martial arts and were taken over the course of several days. Students were examined according to the status of their fathers, the highest ranking allowed to take the test first. Because Maki’s husband Itō Kaname was an ōban with the privilege of shogunal audience, Kinnojō took his exams on the first day. The exams were graded on merit, and in the first round Kinnojō received a score in the highest category and won a monetary prize.54 While the prize was certainly desirable and prestigious, Kaname and Maki still found themselves hardpressed to pay the substantial tuition costs at Shōheizaka, and they hoped fervently that his stay there would result in an official position that might ease the perpetually straitened family finances.55 These concerns for the future of her son and family continued to weigh heavily on Maki when her letters to her family, and our records of her life, cease.

conclusion Depending on familial and individual circumstances, retirement for women from families of means, regardless of formal status, could be quite comfortable. But whatever the circumstances, any kind of ease achieved by women was likely hard earned and long deferred and accomplished with aid from her immediate and extended family. For early modern Japanese women writers, literary production tended to increase, or resume after a childbearing and child-rearing hiatus, in the retirement years. As we have seen, this was certainly the case for literary women in the early Tokugawa period like Inoue Tsūjo, but the same pattern was also visible in the lives of other notable women writers and intellectuals of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, such as Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825) and Matsuo Taseko (1811–94). Makuzu wrote the work for which she is perhaps best known, her family memoir Mukashibanashi (Tale of Times Past), in 1812 when she was forty-nine years old. The work is a passionate ode to the past and an attempt to reconstruct the public memory of her father, the prominent physician and scholar Kudō Heisuke, and her natal family, whose name died out in Makuzu’s generation upon the death and incapacity of her two brothers and family heirs.56 By contrast, her Ōshūbanashi (Tales of the Northeast), completed when she was in her mid-fifties in 1818, is a dispassionate

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discussion of the people and culture that surrounded her in Sendai, in which Makuzu positions herself as the educated observer from the capital, exiled against her will to the provinces.57 Makuzu’s life circumstances made for a narrative of successive upheavals; born in 1763 to a prominent and prosperous Edo intellectual, during her childhood she enjoyed a good education and a vibrant family life in the center of the capital. However, her family fell victim to financial and political hardship in the 1780s, from which it never recovered. After a stint in service in Edo, Makuzu married briefly and divorced while in her twenties and then remarried later in life Tadano Tsurayoshi, a widowed retainer in Sendai domain. On her remarriage Makuzu moved to Sendai—unwillingly, as she later pointed out—and became stepmother to Tadano’s three young sons. After Tadano Tsurayoshi died and her sons reached adulthood, Makuzu turned to writing. While both Mukashibanashi and Ōshūbanashi were products of Makuzu’s later years, it is in the latter work that she articulated an identity for herself as a cultured woman from the capital whose life circumstances compelled her to become an observer of the peculiar culture of the hinterlands. By writing Ōshūbanashi, Makuzu was able to mark herself in a very self-conscious way as an outsider—a person who by her own definition remained intentionally out of place and out of time in the comparatively backward northeast. One could argue that Makuzu’s textual construction of a northeast that was metaphorically distant in both cultural and geographic terms reveals her longing for a civilized time past as well as for a cultured place she once called home. Still, in spite of the hardships the move to the northeast caused for her, her displacement enabled her to fashion a new identity independent of those of wife, daughter, and stepmother that were imposed on her. From the northeast she could do what she wanted to do all her life: write and gain a reputation as a writer. It is no coincidence that she began to write seriously only after her move to Sendai, when she was in her early forties. Once dislocated from the familiarity of home, her subject matter comes readily to hand: it is around her, in the present of the northeast and in the past of her memory. Matsuo Taseko, born into a prosperous village headman’s family in the Ina Valley in Shinano, married at age eighteen and bore ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood.58 She managed her household ably, cultivating silkworms to supplement the family’s income. Well educated in her youth, she was a lifelong composer of poetry in the classical style. In 1861, at age fifty, when her children were grown and her

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household responsibilities passed on to the next generation, Taseko began in earnest to study Hirata Atsutane’s brand of nativist thought. Her retirement gave her the time to travel and to meet with other nativist scholars and poets; her family—including her husband, who like her father was a village headman—supported her endeavors financially and otherwise, and she became active in loyalist political circles just at the moment when the radical anti-shogunal movement was coming together in earnest. In 1862 Taseko took the remarkable step of traveling on foot to Kyoto accompanied only by one servant; she stayed there for six months, becoming actively involved in the loyalist cause in a way that almost certainly would have garnered negative attention from the authorities had she not been an inoffensive-looking older peasant woman. She only returned to Ina in 1863 because the shogunate had initiated a purge of Hirata followers in Kyoto. From her home in Shinano she aided fugitive loyalists who fled there due to the region’s strategic location between Edo and Kyoto and its well-established transportation networks. In 1869, a year after the Restoration, Taseko returned to Kyoto to much acclaim from newly empowered loyalists. She renewed her contacts with prominent figures such as the court noble and soonto-be Meiji statesman Iwakura Tomomi and even worked in his household for a time. Taseko died in 1894 at the age of eighty-three and was posthumously awarded court rank in 1903. She remains a notable figure in the local history of Shinano/Nagano. Of course, even if their families possessed the economic means to enable a leisurely retirement, many women did not live long enough to enjoy its benefits.59 Still both popular discourse and contemporary accounts suggest that if they made it that far, retirement presented considerable and alluring opportunities. In some cases, a woman’s later years were quite the opposite of the retreat into homebound seclusion that the term retirement suggests. Rather, the women discussed in these chapters seem to have gained in stature and influence as they aged; their accomplishments were in many cases public, attributed to them as individuals as well as to their families. And while countless notable women remain unknown, all traces of them long vanished from the documentary record, the work of later generations—both descendants and scholars—to preserve these women’s legacies have made it possible for us to appreciate the distinct trajectories of their lives from our vantage point, distant though it is in both time and space.

Conclusion

On June 24, 2014, Prime Minister Abe Shinzō launched a blog to announce one of his administration’s newest initiatives: a set of proposals to increase the number of working women in Japan and to create more opportunities for women’s empowerment. The title of the first blog post consisted of the English word “SHINE!” in large capital letters next to a photo of Abe’s smiling face. The blog’s subtitle, and the tagline for the reform proposals as a whole, was in Japanese and read, “toward a Japan in which all women can shine” (subete no josei ga, kagayaku Nihon e). Readers of the blog initially were taken aback, not by the radical nature of Abe’s proposals, but because they misread the English exhortation “shine” in Japanese, as shine—the imperative or command form of the verb shinu, meaning “die.” In other words, while Abe meant to encourage women to put their best, shining selves forward for their country and for themselves, it seemed, at least at first glance, as though he was handing them a death sentence. As one acerbic commentator wrote in a response to the post, “Abe is making women have an oldfashioned role. On top of making them accept the duties of child rearing, chores, nursing, they have to do work the same as men. I guess [that means] ‘drop dead.’ ”1 The vexed 2014 policy roll-out was in retrospect a harbinger of the difficulties the Abe government continues to face as it attempts to effect meaningful change in its policies concerning gender roles. Abe’s policies, aimed at enabling women to achieve positions of greater power 217

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and influence in the workplace, in politics, and in society in general, have since been labeled “womenomics,” a corollary of “Abenomics,” the economic reform proposals on which the prime minister has in great part staked the success of his administration.2 The stated goals of “womenomics” are indeed admirable: greatly increasing women’s participation in the workforce, raising the percentage of women returning to work after the birth of their first child, providing better access to child care, extending the length of maternity leaves, increasing the frequency of paternity leaves, and, perhaps most ambitiously, raising the percentage of women in managerial positions in the private and public sectors to 30 percent by 2020. The potential gains of such initiatives are significant: a recent report on women and the Japanese economy by the U.S. investment banking firm Goldman Sachs estimates that if women’s rate of participation in the workforce (currently approximately 65 percent) was increased to that of men (approximately 80 percent), “the absolute level of Japan’s GDP could be lifted by as much as 12.5%.”3 This statistic, however, highlights the real intent of Abe’s policies, which is not principally to address fundamental gender inequality but to revive the Japanese economy by accessing a vast store of underutilized human resources: women workers. That the prime minister himself is more concerned with measurable economic outcomes than with social change is not surprising, for he has in the past publicly advocated quite conservative family values; as recently as 2005 he and other conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers warned that Japanese tradition would be undermined if women worked outside the home and that women should focus on bearing and raising children. But when confronted with statistics showing that in other industrialized countries higher rates of female employment actually correlate with higher fertility rates, Abe did an about-face, and “womenomics” is the result.4 Although it is still in its early stages of implementation, there is scant evidence that the Abe administration’s reform program is having much of an effect. While the rate of women’s participation in the workforce rose in 2014 to an all-time high of 65 percent, surpassing for the first time women’s workforce participation in the United States, observers are quick to point out that the majority of these jobs are part-time, with relatively low pay, few or no benefits, and little chance for career advancement.5 And unlike in other industrialized countries, Japan’s female workforce, when broken down and graphed by age, is still characterized by a noticeable “M-curve,” whereby many women (by some measures as much as 60 percent of the female workforce) tend to stop working during childbearing

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years and seek employment again only when their children are grown.6 Perhaps because of the pressures on women—both external and selfimposed—to quit work after having children, in Japan only 8 percent of senior positions in businesses are held by women, as compared to a global average of 22 percent, and 66 percent of Japanese businesses recently surveyed have no women at all in senior leadership positions, more than double the global average.7 Not a single one of the companies on the Nikkei 225 index (the Japanese equivalent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average) is headed by a woman.8 The data on women in electoral politics are, if anything, even less promising: in 2015 only 9 percent of Japan’s 722 members of parliament were women, putting the percentage of female elected officials in Japan below that of even Iraq (27 percent), Saudi Arabia (20 percent), and Libya (18 percent).9 The gender gap in pay, too, remains substantial, with Japanese women in 2011 on average earning 71 percent of what men earn, making the gender gap in wages in Japan greater than that in northern European countries and the United States by ten percentage points or more.10 All these factors combine to give Japan a rather dismal ranking of 101st out of 145 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2015 Global Gender Gap Report, which surveys and ranks world economies “according to how well they are leveraging their female talent pool, based on economic, educational, health-based and political indicators.”11 In short, as defined by practically every quantitative measure available to date, and according even to Prime Minister Abe himself, contemporary Japan faces a number of significant problems when it comes to women. “Clearly,” the prime minister wrote in April 2015 in a statement on the results of the reforms, “we must do more.”12 In policy terms, this is no doubt true. As Abe’s many critics inside and outside Japan are quick to point out, many of his reform proposals are toothless: the goal of placing more women in top corporate leadership roles, for example, contains few incentives for companies to actually do so and no penalties for those that fail to comply. But other statistics point to more complicated challenges to achieving gender equality. Recent surveys show that, assuming they can maintain a comfortable standard of living on their husbands’ income alone, increasing numbers of women prefer to stay at home rather than negotiate the challenges of the workplace: whereas in 2004, 41 percent of women surveyed said they would prefer staying home over working, by 2012, that figure had increased to just over 50 percent. Another survey in 2013 showed that one-third of young women wanted to become full-time homemakers.13 Still other reports point to

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the enormous social pressures on married women to have children; even today, married women who choose to remain childless face criticism and suspicion.14 If Prime Minister Abe’s definition of “doing more” means women need to reproduce at home as well as produce in the workplace, the women who responded to these polls seem to want to do less. While such opinion polls are at best rough indicators that cannot represent all Japanese women, they still give pause. When it comes to work, family, and life course, what do women really want? Does embracing “womenomics” really mean that women need to do more, and do it differently? These considerations bring us back to the main themes of this book: the challenges women encounter when trying to reconcile social norms with individual autonomy, obligations to others with desires of their own, limited public authority with myriad forms of private power. A continuing theme throughout the book and, one could argue, up to the present day is the issue of the importance and effectiveness of women’s action. Early modern popular discourse encouraged women to be active in myriad ways—learning, writing, working, managing, mothering—that would benefit themselves, their families, and society at large. Individual women, as we have seen, acted for their own benefit and for the benefit of others. I avoid claiming that women had “agency,” because women did not in every instance act with intent to effect change. Instead I prefer the term praxis. Praxis is usually defined as the embodiment or enactment of theory or principle, and I use it here to indicate what women actually did: the duties they assumed, the ways they behaved, the endeavors they undertook. Specifically, I have sought to analyze praxis as apart from agency when examining women’s roles and lives. Whether an individual acts because of or in the name of a larger principle is always difficult to discern, much more in past times, for which sources are limited and the author’s intent often obscure. But armed with the same body of sources one can discern what an individual did, and this information alone can afford us some insight into a life. As Clifford Geertz puts it, “Behavior must be attended to, and with some exactness, because it is through the flow of behavior—or, more precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation.”15 In the lives of women encountered throughout this book, I argue that actions taken in response to the vagaries of circumstance determined life course at least as much as principle, planning, and forethought did. In the abstract women’s normative duties as wives were clearly spelled out, but in actuality those duties varied according to the particular circumstances of a woman’s natal and married households: the status of the

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household mattered, to be sure, but so did circumstances such as whether in-laws were present, whether her mother-in-law was younger and vigorous or older and infirm, whether there were siblings, stepchildren, or concubines in the picture, whether finances were ample or restricted, whether ties to the natal family remained close or were rejected in favor of the marital family. All of these factors influenced what actions a woman might undertake and therefore distinctly inflected the various roles she inhabited: daughter, wife, mother, retired matriarch, writer, poet, traveler, and so on. While the possibilities were far from unlimited, neither were they predetermined. In every case, a woman’s importance in the family—and therefore in society—rested as much on her performance of a prescribed role as it did on the role itself. To say that women’s roles in families were important suggests that the role was greater than the individual who filled it. But as the preceding chapters show, women made and remade their roles through their own actions and initiative, often in unexpected ways. The women whose lives and writings I have presented here were in some ways exceptional, but I tend to see them as conventional in important ways: although they were not of the same class, all were brought up in the stem family system, all married, all had children, all had longstanding and mutually dependent relationships with parents, all lived to see at least some of their children into adulthood. All of these women also succeeded in an ideological system whose principles they seemed to at times challenge. This suggests that they were not seen as rebels or exceptions but as parts of the system itself. They made the system work for them and their families, for even if their actions were at odds with a given principle, the same actions could be accepted and even lauded if they could be shown to conform to another, equally valued principle. Such exchanges of value rooted in action were possible in late Tokugawa Japan because, to borrow from Francesca Bray’s analysis of gender roles in late imperial China, authorities were less concerned with orthodoxy, or correct belief, than they were with orthopraxy, or correct practice.16 Orthodoxy demands thought and behavior that consistently conform to principle, whereas orthopraxy requires only that action is or is construed to be in accord with principle in order to be deemed correct. By examining women’s actions—praxis—we can perceive how and why “unorthodox” behavior was not only allowed, but encouraged, and lives that seemed extraordinary or problematic were in fact acceptable oscillations of the norm. Through action, women created meaning and effected change.

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If we see women in the early modern period through the lens of (ortho)praxis, then the present-day situation looks different. Today Japanese women seem at least as bound by norms as they were several centuries ago. This is due in part to the relatively greater regulatory power of the modern state, as compared to the political system of the Tokugawa era. Pundits in Japan today have made much of the polls cited above that indicate women prefer to stay home rather than work, declaring that such housewives prefer their “three squares and a nap” (sanshoku hirune tsuki) to getting out of the house and working for pay.17 But other observers note that Japanese tax law offers tax incentives to two-income couples only if the wife’s annual income (assumed to be the second income) is less than ¥1.03 million (approximately US$8,300); if a married woman’s earnings exceed this amount, she and her husband cannot take the tax break.18 Such built-in structural biases exist not only in the taxation system but in other domains as well: upon marriage women must be struck from their natal family registers (koseki) and entered into those of their husbands’ families, making it impossible for married women to legally maintain their maiden names or to have independent legal status; this makes the modern state a vehicle for the maintenance not only of patrilinealism but of patriarchy as well.19 Seen in this context, women’s preference not to work outside the home looks less like choosing a life of leisure and more like opting out of a political and economic system that affords few opportunities and even less satisfaction. In other words, to borrow the language of praxis, Japanese women today may be acting by not doing. Nonaction may be a rational solution now, but as the preceding chapters have shown, the Tokugawa state was quite different from its modern counterpart. Its relative weakness allowed latitude for women’s actions and behavior that the modern state does not. While women in the early modern period certainly lived under gender-based constraints, those constraints were by and large not imposed legally or uniformly. Early modern Japanese gender roles and relations were remarkably flexible and hybrid, especially as compared to those of today, and those that prevailed among the gentry in late imperial China and among the aristocracy in Chosŏn Korea. This contrast across time and space suggests that gender roles are not consistent across ideological communities (i.e., “Confucian East Asia”), nor do they evolve on a model of linear progress. Japanese women today continue to grapple with the issue of how, when, and in whose interests to act. To say that their early modern predecessors also struggled with this problem of praxis is not to suggest

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that nothing ever changes but rather that the reasons for change inhere in political and legal systems, social values, and economic structures. Women were not and are not incidental to these structures; they were and are its foundations. In the same vein, for those of us who study women in the past, gender history is no longer compensatory; that is, its main goal is no longer the “inclusion” of women in the historical narrative. In many ways, gender history is about seeing women’s problems as “our” problems, complex problems that transcend national, cultural, linguistic, and temporal boundaries. I have tried throughout this book to present the problem of women as a process of negotiation involving men, women, families, and communities, in which there were not always clear winners and losers. The book is not about easy answers to these many and complicated problems. Then as now, there are no simple prescriptions, no comprehensive policy proposals that can make everything right. While it suggests some answers, I hope that this book will raise more questions and also contribute to the ongoing debate over “normative” gender roles and women’s lives in Japan and elsewhere.

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Notes

introduction 1. Inoue Tsūjo, Tōkai kikō, 47–48. 2. From the time of its founding in the early seventeenth century the shogunate policed women’s travel more vigorously than it did practically any other aspect of women’s behavior. Unlike most shogunal laws, enforcement became stricter as time passed, with the number of travel document inspections and detainments for infractions reaching its peak in 1815. A good proportion of infractions (18 percent) had to do with miswording in travel documents of descriptions of a woman’s age or status, as was the case with Tsūjo. On laws regarding women’s travel, see Diana E. Wright, “Female Crime and State Punishment in Early Modern Japan,” 19–20. 3. This incident is also recounted in Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity, 51–52; and Shiba Keiko, Literary Creations on the Road, 71–72. 4. The demographic problems facing Japan led Prime Minister Abe Shinzō to announce in June 2014 a set of governmental initiatives for increasing women’s participation in the workforce and in public life, with a particular goal of increasing the number of working mothers; see the conclusion for a more extensive discussion. 5. Fukuzawa Yukichi and Eiichi Kiyooka, Fukuzawa Yukichi on Japanese Women, 18. 6. Of course, modern conceptions of women’s roles did not eradicate the practice of “old” customs, and it is not surprising to learn that Fukuzawa himself was a less than enlightened patriarch with regard to the women in his own family. Fukuzawa’s daughter once recalled that as a young girl her freedom of expression and choice was severely limited and that “she was allowed next to no contact with men until her marriage at the age of eighteen, and even then her

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opinion was not consulted.” See Carmen Blacker, “Fukuzawa Yukichi on Husband-Wife Relationships,” 156 n. 24. 7. Quoted in Marnie Anderson, A Place in Public, 101; for voicing her opinions, Kishida was jailed. 8. Anderson, A Place in Public, 67–68. 9. Shidzue Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways, 38. 10. Alice Mabel Bacon, Japanese Girls and Women, 392. 11. As Mara Patessio puts it, “Women had carved out a ‘woman’s world’ (fujin shakai), a theoretical and ideological space in which women could debate issues of importance to themselves and their “sisters” (shimai) and from which they could hope to create change in public policy—but always with the goal of building the nation and educating future generations.” Patessio, Women and Public Life in Early Meiji Japan, 160. It should be noted that Meiji activists seldom assessed the experience of women in the Tokugawa period on its own terms; instead, they rhetorically refashioned recent memory in order to use the “feudal” past for modern, ideological purposes. As Anderson writes, “For modern readers, the conditions described in the Onna daigaku constituted the imaginative place from which ‘women’ were to be raised.” Anderson, A Place in Public, 20. 12. In English this argument is most cogently made with regard to women of the peasant class by Anne Walthall in “Devoted Wives/Unruly Women” and The Weak Body of a Useless Woman. In Japanese, see Nagano Hiroko, “Nōson ni okeru josei no yakuwari to shosō”; Nagashima Junko, “Bakumatsu nōson josei no kōdō no jiyū to kaji rōdō”; Sugano Noriko, “Nōson josei no rōdō to seikatsu.” Regarding women travelers of varied status backgrounds, see Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity; Shiba Keiko, Kinsei onna tabi nikki. On women, work, and the Tokugawa state, see Yokota Fuyuhiko, “Imagining Working Women in Early Modern Japan”; Amy Stanley, Selling Women. In Japanese the work on Tokugawa-period women’s history is voluminous; on the tension between official ideology and gendered practices in particular, see Nagano Hiroko, “Bakuhan hō to josei”; Ōguchi Yūjirō, Josei no iru kinsei; Yabuta Yutaka, Otoko to onna no kinseishi and Joseishi toshite no kinsei. 13. Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print, esp. 13–53. 14. I have derived this figure from works listed in a recent comprehensive bibliography, Joshi yō ōraimono kanpon sōmokuroku (1999), compiled by Koizumi Yoshinaga, the leading scholar of ōraimono. Koizumi himself builds on research stretching across the better part of the past century, including Okamura Kintarō, ed., Ōraimono bunrui mokuroku; Ishikawa Ken, Joshi yō ōraimono bunrui mokuroku, Nihon shomin kyōiku shi; Ishikawa Matsutarō, Ōraimono no seiritsu to hatten; Ishikawa Matsutarō, ed., Kikō ōraimono shūsei, Ōraimono taikei, and Onna daigaku shū; Ishikawa Ken and Ishikawa Matsutarō, eds., Nihon kyōkasho taikei; and Emori Ichirō, Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu daijiten. There are numerous critical studies of prescriptive texts for women (jokunsho) in Japanese; summary works include Hayashi Kana, “Ken narazaru tsuma to wa”; Nakano Setsuko, Kangaeru onnatachi: kanazōshi kara “Onna daigaku”; Sugano Noriko, Edo jidai no kōkōmono; Shiba Keiko, “Joseitachi no kaita Edo zenki no joshi kyōkasho” and “Joseitachi no kaita Edo

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kōki no joshi kyōkasho”; Kuwabara Megumi, “Kinseiteki kyōyō bunka to josei.” 15. Recent works in English discussing or utilizing as sources instructional texts in general as well as those for women include Michael Kinski, “Treasure Boxes, Fabrics, and Mirrors”; Markus Rüttermann, “What Does ‘Literature of Correspondence’ Mean?”; William R. Lindsey, Fertility and Pleasure; P. F. Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books for Women?”; Martha C. Tocco, “Norms and Texts for Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan.” 16. Early (ca. late seventeenth century) published instructional texts for women were written primarily for parents of girls, but later texts were aimed at women readers themselves. On increases in women’s literacy in the early modern period, see note 19, below. 17. Major collections of Edo-period women’s writings include Furuya Tomoyoshi, Edo jidai joryū bungaku zenshū, 4 vols.; Maeda Yoshi, Edo jidai jōryū bungei shi, Edo jidai jōryū bungei shi, and Kinsei nyonin tabi nikki shū. For critical approaches to women’s writings, see Sakurai Yūki, Sugano Noriko, and Nagano Hiroko, eds., Jendaa de yomitoku Edo jidai; Kado Reiko, Edo joryū bungaku no hakken. See also the edited texts of women’s writings published in the journal Edo-ki onna kō, 1990–2004. 18. An edited version of the diary can be found in Yokohama-shi Bunkazai Chōsakai, ed., Yokohama-shi bunkazai chōsa hōkokusho, vol. 8, nos. 1–25 (1971–85). 19. Women’s literacy was highly variable by class/status, occupation, and place of origin (most notably the urban/rural divide), and grew significantly over the course of the early modern period. Women of the elite classes (samurai and courtier) were uniformly literate from the beginning of the era, and there is evidence of moderate to high literacy among certain sectors of the commoner population—most notably women in literati (bunjin) families, women of the wealthy rural entrepreneur or village headman classes, and women in merchant households—by the mid-eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century basic education in reading and writing was becoming available even to women in poorer rural families. On female literacy and overall literacy in the Edo period, see Anne Walthall, “Female Literacy from Edo to Meiji,” esp. 219–24; and Richard Rubinger, Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. 20. An exception is Bettina Gramlich-Oka’s work on the startling originality of the woman writer Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825), the daughter of Kudō Heisuke (1734–1800), a commoner physician in service to Sendai domain; Makuzu married into the samurai class. See Gramlich-Oka, Thinking Like a Man. 21. The records to which I refer are the so-called temple registration records, the shūmon aratame-chō, which were compiled under shogunal order in the early seventeenth century and required all households to register an affiliation with a Buddhist temple; and the population registration records, the ninbetsu aratame chō. On these records, see chap. 4, n. 2. The most comprehensive genealogical records for the samurai class are collected in the early nineteenth-century Kansei chōshū shokafu, but these are limited in that they do not contain women’s full names and do not always record the intricacies of adoptions and remarriages. On the factual shortcomings of public or “outside” documents

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Notes to Pages 8–12

and their relation to private/familial or “inside” documents, see Luke S. Roberts, Performing the Great Peace. 22. On this debate, see Germaine Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan; Andrew Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan; see also Peter Duus and Irwin Scheiner, “Socialism, Liberalism and Marxism, 1901–1931.” 23. Poetry can, of course, be analyzed for its political and social meaning; in English, see in particular Anne Walthall’s analysis of the nativist poetry and political activism of Matsuo Taseko (1811–94) and Laura Nenzi’s study of the “chaos and cosmos” of the poet and teacher Kurosawa Tokiko before and after the Meiji Restoration, studies that situate poetic composition by women in their political and social context. See Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman; Nenzi, The Chaos and Cosmos of Kurosawa Tokiko. 24. Peter Laslett, Introduction to Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, eds., Household and Family in Past Time, 1–89. 25. On variations on the stem family in Europe and Asia, see Antoinette Fauve-Chamous and Emiko Ochiai, eds., The Stem Family in Eurasian Perspective. Not all scholars are convinced of the universality of the stem family: Peter Laslett questions the stem family as an enduring empirical reality, suggesting that “it may have been an ideal to which many or all aspired, but few achieved” (Introduction to Laslett and Wall, Household and Family in Past Time, 22). 26. Drixler, Mabiki, 62. 27. Ann Waltner shows that nonkin and matrilateral-kin adoptions nonetheless were far more common than previously thought; see Waltner, Getting an Heir. 28. The Japanese “custom” of son-in-law adoption was so foreign and distasteful to Koreans that it had to be forcefully implemented by Japanese colonial authorities in the late 1930s. See Sungyun Lim, “Enemies of the Lineage.” 29. Sasaki Junnosuke, Bakuhan kenryoku no kiso kōzō, 174 ff. 30. For the classic view of the transformation in family structure in early modern Japan in English, see Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. 31. These prohibitions were not always obeyed to the letter, and occasionally local governments employed compromise solutions; see examples from Higo Province in Sasaki, Bakuhan kenryoku no kiso kōzō, 167. 32. This practice continues today and has resulted in press coverage of Japan as the home of the world’s oldest “family-owned” businesses. See Emily Tamkin, “Keeping It in the Family”; Mariko Oi, “Adult Adoptions”; “Keeping It in the Family: Family Firms Adopt an Unusual Approach to Remain Competitive,” Economist, Dec. 1, 2012. 33. Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home, 31–32, 34; on the family as a unit of economic production regardless of kin ties, Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott write, “At any time those living and working together constituted a ‘family’ whether or not they were related by blood.” See Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family, 13. 34. On Japan as a “high-divorce” country in the early modern period, see Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan, esp. 1–46. On divorce among the rural com-

Notes to Pages 13–23

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moner class in the early modern period, see Ōtō Osamu, “Fufu kenka, rikon to sonraku shakai.” 35. See Nagashima Junko, “Kinsei kazoku ni okeru josei no ichi to yakuwari,” 323. 36. G. William Skinner, “Conjugal Power in Tokugawa Japanese Families,” 239. 37. Skinner, “Conjugal Power,” 240. A similar argument is made by Nagashima Junko in “Kinsei kazoku ni okeru josei no ichi to yakuwari.” 38. Nagano Hiroko, “Bakuhan-sei kokka no seiji kōzō to josei” and “Bakuhansei seiritsu ki no ie to josei chigyō.” 39. On Song Neo-Confucianism in Japan, see Watanabe Hiroshi, Kinsei Nihon shakai to Sōgaku; on conjugal relations in Japan, see Watanabe Hiroshi, “ ‘Fufu yūbetsu’ to ‘fufu aiwa shi.’ ” 40. The ideal of family as an enduring sociopolitical entity was particularly strong in early modern Japan, Korea, and China at all levels of society, whereas in early modern Europe it was relatively weak outside of the aristocratic ruling class. 41. See especially Yabuta Yutaka, “Kinsei josei no raifu saikuru.” 42. On “crisis thinking,” see Tetsuo Najita’s study and translation of the writings of Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728), Tokugawa Political Writings; see also Tetsuo Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan. 43. On eighteenth-century fiction, see Adam L. Kern, Manga from the Floating World; Haruko Iwasaki, “The Literature of Wit and Humor in Late Eighteenth-Century Edo.” On eighteenth-century printmaking, see Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edo Culture, esp. 53–75. 44. On travel, see Constantine Vaporis, Breaking Barriers; Laura Nenzi, Excursions in Identity; Konno Nobuo, Edo no tabi. 45. On the “reverse fertility transition,” see chap. 3; and Drixler, Mabiki, esp. 9–15. 46. Joan W. Scott, “Gender.”

chapter 1 1. See Donald Holzman, “The Place of Filial Piety in Ancient China”; and Ikeda Tomohisa, “The Evolution of the Concept of Filial Piety (孝) in the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and the Guodian Bamboo Text Yucong.” See also Joan Judge and Hu Ying, eds., Introduction to Beyond Exemplar Tales. 2. For a recent English translation of Lienü zhuan, see Liu Xiang, Exemplary Women of Early China. 3. As Judge and Hu put it, “While the explicit purpose of the Biographies of Women and its later rescensions was to describe, contain, and regulate women’s lives, the ultimate objective of these various texts was to mold Chinese culture and morality.” Judge and Hu, Beyond Exemplar Tales, 3. 4. Qian Nanxiu, “Lienü versus Xianyuan,” in Judge and Hu, Beyond Exemplar Tales, p. 75. 5. On the “Confucianization” of Chosŏn Korea, see Martina Deuchler, The Confucian Transformation of Korea.

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6. See Mega Atsuko, Kinsei no kazoku to josei, 140–41. 7. Sugano Noriko, “State Indoctrination of Filial Piety in Tokugawa Japan,” 174–77. 8. Further, insofar as the Kankoku kōgiroku was a text aimed at the edification of commoners, one can read it, as Sugano Noriko has, as an attempt by the state to shore up the value of filial piety for all. Ibid. The official promotion of filial piety as a value for all classes paralleled the shift one sees in the status of women protagonists in filial piety tales, as elite exemplars (empresses, noblewomen, and warrior women) gave way to commoner models. 9. In terms of actual legal cases, violent acts by women in the name of filial piety seem to have been few. The most dramatic example was the 1792 case of a filial daughter named Soyo who borrowed money from an unscrupulous man in exchange for five years of indentured labor in order to buy medicine for her ailing father. The moneylender then sold her into prostitution for a far greater sum than she actually owed, and when Soyo discovered his deceit, she escaped and set fire to his house. Soyo’s case was heard by the shogunate’s High Court, which handed down two death sentences to Soyo (one for arson and one for attacking her “master,” the moneylender). At the same time, the court invalidated Soyo’s contract to the brothel and ordered her to pay back her original loan over a period of many years, thus delaying her death sentence more or less indefinitely. For a description of the incident, see Diana E. Wright, “Female Crime and State Punishment in Early Modern Japan,” 23–24. 10. One example of the dry bureaucratese of the text (and the pragmatic, rule-following thinking that undergirded it) is a case described in Item 8 of the “Rules of Compilation” of the Kankoku kōgiroku: “In the streets of Edo, a man severed the fingers of his hands and the toes of his feet in order to convey his desperation over his father’s dire circumstances. Although he received a local award, his case was excluded here because it cannot serve as a model for others to follow.” Quoted in Wright, Female Crime and State Punishment in Early Modern Japan,” 178. 11. On the courtesan at Eguchi and Saigyō, see Bernard Faure, The Power of Denial, 265–67. 12. The shift from honoring husbands to honoring parents was not absolute even in the exemplar tales, and evidence of women’s devotion to their husbands exists in legal records from the time. See, e.g., Walthall, “Devoted Wives/Unruly Women.” Still, the emphasis on the natal family in Japanese prescriptive texts remains notable. The reasons for this lie in the structure of the Japanese family system, which is discussed later in the chapter. 13. Honchō jokan shō, p. 382. 14. Ibid., 383. 15. Ibid., 384. 16. Ibid., 384–85. 17. Whereas women’s self-sacrifice for moral causes comprised only 30 percent of exemplary women’s tales compiled in the Hou Hanshu, the theme came to dominate the genre in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing periods, with 75 percent of the Yuanshi tales, 90 percent of the Mingshi tales, and 92 percent of the Qingshi gao tales involving women’s suicide or self-sacrifice, usually in order to protect

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their chastity. See Qian, Lienü versus Xianyuan, 81–82. Janet Theiss notes that in late imperial China the emphasis was on conjugal patriarchy, while in Japan it was patrilineal patriarchy; this perhaps explains in part the absence of a chastity cult in early modern Japan comparable to that in China. Theiss, pers. comm., Mar. 24, 2013. 18. Honchō onna nijūshi kō. The text is of course a revision of the Chinese classic Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, written by Guo Jujing during the Yuan dynasty. In the Chinese original all but one of the paragons are male (the one exception is #10, Lady Tang, who breastfeeds her aged mother-in-law when she realizes the old woman cannot chew her food); this text was revised for women in the Ming period, and it includes exemplars such as the woman who cuts a piece from her own liver to feed her ailing mother-in-law. 19. The theme of women’s devotion to their mothers in Honchō nijūshi kō continues in the story of Ikeda Yūya, daughter of the headman of a post station on the Tōkaidō, who goes into service to Minister of the Interior Taira no Munemori and becomes his favorite. When Yūya’s mother becomes ill and she asks to return home to care for her, Munemori initially refuses but changes his mind upon reading a poem Yūya has written in honor of her dying mother. Finally, the Kesa Gozen story is repeated in this collection with a slight but critical plot change (Komorogawa rejects Endō Moritō’s request to wed Kesa Gozen, thus supplying him with a clearer motive to take revenge on Komorogawa). 20. “Two-sword fighting” refers to simultaneous use of the long sword (katana) and the short sword (wakizashi), as opposed to the more traditional two-handed grip on the katana alone. 21. Sappō Tenrin (Skt: Chakravartin) was the ethical and benevolent ruler of the universe in ancient Indian cosmology. 22. The term hosshin indicates bringing forth or awakening the mind; bōdai refers to having the thought of or becoming a bodhisattva. 23. The crane is a symbol of long life and good fortune and was a highly treasured animal; hunting one required a special permit. Killing a crane was a highly inauspicious act and would thus have heightened the gravity of the hunter’s offense in the minds of early modern readers. 24. Honchō onna nijūshi kō, 435. 25. Ibid., 436. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. A notable point in the preceding two tales is the importance of Buddhism and filial principle in the lives of these families. In the case of the hunter Okada’s daughters, religion and filial piety together are the driving forces behind both the tragedy and the moral teaching of the story; indeed, the tragedy is the moral teaching. The story of Sasaki Kanryū’s daughter is less tragic, but it does involve the daughter’s sacrifice of self in a spiritual sense in that she becomes a nun and gives up her secular life. One might read this as a statement about the importance of both Confucian and Buddhist traditions in this set of exemplar tales and among the reading audience in general. The strong Buddhist themes may also indicate the continuing influence of setsuwa, to which these two tales bear considerable resemblance.

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28. Willing to sacrifice themselves in the face of overwhelming challenges, such women became the inspiration for dramatic adaptations in jōruri, bunraku and kabuki of the later Tokugawa period. David Atherton argues that the great seventeenth-century writer Ihara Saikaku (1642–1693), in his works on filial impiety, Honchō nijū fukō, and samurai ethics, Budō denraiki, engaged in a similar process of pushing the boundaries of plausibility in order to experiment with different possibilities for human interaction. See Ihara Saikaku, Honchō nijū fukō and Budō denraiki. See also Atherton, Writing Violence in an Age of Peace. 29. Matsudaira Yorinori, Daitō fujo teiretsu ki. 30. The first is set in the pre-Edo past, in the Kōnin era (810–24), and tells the story of the devotion of Tamanae, wife of the peasant Hata Denza, to her motherin-law. The next three stories take place in the late Warring States and early Edo periods and focus on women who stand behind powerful men: Katsu-jo, who loyally served Oda Nobuyuki (1536–57), younger brother and antagonist of Oda Nobunaga (1534–82); Kasuga no Tsubone, wet nurse to the eventual third shogun, Tokugawa Iemitsu; and “The Wife of Hamada So-and-So” in Yamato Province, who led her samurai husband’s would-be attackers astray. 31. Matsudaira, Daitō fujo teiretsu ki, 30. 32. Ibid., 31. 33. Ibid., 33 34. Ibid., 35. 35. Scholarship on the kabuki play Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi (1780), which was inspired by the tale of the two sisters, tends to treat the vendetta as fact; Brandon and Leiter write that the play is based on “an incident that occurred in Ōshū in 1723.” See James Brandon and Samuel L. Leiter, Kabuki Plays On-Stage, 2:84. The town of Shiroishi in Miyagi Prefecture, where the events ostensibly took place, presents the sisters’ vendetta plot as historical fact in its tourist literature, but the historian Mitamura Engyō calls the tale “a complete lie,” and Ujiie Mikito argues that because the tale has entertained audiences for generations, it is meaningful regardless of whether or not it is factual. For the latter debates, see Ujie, Katakiuchi, 211–12, 219–20; see also Mitamura, “Katakiuchi no hanashi.” 36. This reference would place the tale as having occurred before Shōsetsu’s attempted coup against the shogunate in 1651, which resulted in his death by seppuku later that year in order to avoid arrest. 37. Matsudaira, Daitō fujo teiretsu ki, 38–39. 38. Ibid., 40. 39. Kabuki version by Ki no Jōtarō, Utei Enba, and Yō Yōtai, in Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū, vol. 77: Jōruri shū; for an English translation of the one scene that continues to be performed in kabuki today, see Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays On-Stage, vol. 2. 40. See Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays On-Stage, 2:84. 41. Ibid., 96. 42. Ibid., 97. 43. Santō Kyōden zenshū, 1:51. The final two stories in Daitō fujo teiretsu ki also focus on women taking action to defend the interests of their masters and

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their own families. The first of the two, “The Younger Sister of Date Aki Muneyuki,” takes place in the Kanbun era (1661–73). A daimyo in Sendai, Matsudaira Tsunamune, retires, but his heir Kamechiyo is only nine years old. Tsunamune fears intrigue at his Edo residence while he is away in Sendai on official business, so he puts his younger sister, Asaoka, in charge as wet nurse to his son. Before he leaves, he tells Asaoka that if she acts properly in caring for Kamechiyo, she will “bring peace to the realm (kuni).” “Follow the teachings of [Shinto, Confucianism, and Buddhism] and make your heart straight,” he tells her, “move to the good and guide the young lord in the correct way.” Asaoka takes her brother’s words to heart, and she soon discovers and foils a plot to poison Kamechiyo. With the help of a loyal retainer named Matsumae Kinnosuke, the perpetrators are killed. Asaoka takes over preparation of all the young lord’s food herself and remains vigilant against further threats. In the end, her actions “result in peace in the realm.” The last story in the collection involves the daughter of Matsuda Sukehachi, retainer of the Kai branch of the Mōri family. The events take place in the women’s quarter of the Matsuda residence in 1724. O-michi has become her master’s favorite, displacing an older consort, Sawano, who reacts by victimizing O-michi. One day Sawano berates the younger woman for using someone else’s sandals (zori) without asking. Using this minor offense as a pretext, she accuses O-michi of not being worthy of service in a bushi household. O-michi is devastated by this criticism; she tells her maid, Satsu, what has transpired, and eventually O-michi commits suicide. Satsu, upon learning of this, goes to the women’s quarters, announces O-michi’s death, and then avenges her mistress by murdering Sawano, whom she holds responsible: “You killed her with your words!,” Satsu declares, and taking the short sword with which O-michi killed herself, Satsu stabs Sawano in the throat “three, four, times, until she breathes her last.” After Sawano’s death all manner of plots against the lord are discovered and their perpetrators punished. Satsu is honored for her loyalty to O-michi. But, as if one tragedy were not enough, after meeting Satsu and praising her, O-michi’s father also commits suicide in his daughter’s memory—a strikingly extreme and rare example of parental devotion on the part of a father. Satsu’s acts, the reader is told, bring prosperity to her own family, which rises to become one of the more powerful in the area. This last completes the inversions of the story, as the servant’s family prospers due to her filial behavior, while the mistress’s declines. Like the story of Miyagino and Shinobu, the story of Sawano’s villainy and Satsu’s virtuous deeds was made into the kabuki play Kagamiyama kokyō no nishiki-e (Mirror Mountain: A Women’s Treasury of Loyalty). 44. For a short biography of Tsūjo, see the afterword to Inoue Tsū, Inoue Tsūjo zenshū (hereafter cited as ITZ), 371–79. 45. ITZ, 3–4. 46. Tsūjo’s father was a scholar of Neo-Confucianism, and his teachings no doubt shaped Tsūjo’s early writings. 47. Inoue Tsūjo, Shojo no fu, in ITZ, 28–30. 48. Inoue Tsūjo, Shinkei ki, in ITZ, 34. 49. Ibid., 34–35. 50. For biographical information on the Nakayama family, see Kuramoto Kyōko, “Fujii shi onna no ki to Suzuko nikki ni tsuite.”

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51. Naoharu was descended from the Kaji, one of seven historically prominent clans in Musashi. 52. Nakayama Suzuko, Fujii shi onna no ki, 128; on Suzuko’s writings, see Kuramoto, “Fujii shi onna no ki to Suzuko nikki ni tsuite.” 53. The distance between the two is approximately 4 km. 54. Nakayama, Fujii shi onna no ki, 130. 55. Ibid., 144. 56. For an edited text of Matsukage nikki, see Ueno Yōzō, ed., Matsukage nikki; on Tsunayoshi, Ōgimachi Machiko, and Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, see Beatrice Bodart-Bailey, “Councillor Defended.” 57. The kabuki play is titled Kōmon ki osana kōshaku and was first produced in Tokyo in 1878. 58. Kuramoto, “Fujii shi onna no ki to Suzuko nikki ni tsuite,” 153. 59. This collection was titled Hengyokushū and was an anthology of prose from the Heian through Edo periods compiled by a wealthy merchant literatus in the service of the Satake of Akita domain named Tsumura Sōan (1736–1806). See Kuramoto, “Fujii shi onna no ki to Suzuko nikki ni tsuite.” 60. Nakayama, Suzuko nikki, 146. 61. Kuramoto, “Fujii shi onna no ki to Suzuko nikki ni tsuite,” 156–57. 62. See chapter 3; Suzuko may have remained with the Nakayama because her natal family was scattered in the wake of her father’s assassination. 63. The letters were discovered by happenstance by the historian Mega Atsuko in 2008, in the family archives of Maki’s natal family, the Kobayashi, in Okayama Prefecture. On the discovery of the letters, the number, and their structure, see Mega, Buke ni totsuida josei no tegami, 1–15. 64. On the Kobayashi family, see Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 18–23. 65. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 160. 66. Several recent studies on the regulation of reproduction and women’s behavior are based on documents from Okayama. See Sawayama Mikako, Shussan to shintai no kinsei; Mikako Sawayama and Elizabeth A. Leicester, “The ‘Birthing Body’ and the Regulation of Conception and Childbirth in the Edo Period”; Mega Atsuko, Kinsei no kazoku to josei.

chapter 2 1. This is one of many texts used as primers in the Tokugawa period that contain the name “Imagawa” in their titles. The reference is to Imagawa Sadayo (or Ryōshun, 1325–1420), a noted medieval poet and military leader who wrote a famous set of moral precepts for his son Nakaaki. These precepts were later reproduced and adapted for different circumstances and audiences. See Carl Steenstrup, “The Imagawa Letter.” 2. Sawada-shi no onna, a.k.a. Sawada Kichi, Onna Imagawa, 207–11. 3. Onna daigaku has been translated into English numerous times over the years, and for generations it was the only easily accessible example of Tokugawa-period ideas about women. See, e.g., Kaibara Ekiken, “Greater Learning for Women,” in Women and the Wisdom of Japan.

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4. On Confucian concepts of self-cultivation, see Philip J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation; Wei-Ming Tu, Humanity and Self-Cultivation, esp. 5–68. 5. On Kaibara Ekiken’s definition of moral and spiritual self-cultivation, see Mary Evelyn Tucker, Moral and Spiritual Cultivation in Japanese NeoConfucianism, 53–84. 6. On these terms, see Susan L. Burns, “The Body as Text.” 7. I follow Dorothy Ko in translating the principle of sanjū as “thrice following” rather than the “three obediences.” Ko places less emphasis on “obedience” to male authority than on the idea that a woman was defined socially and politically by the status of the male head of household in each stage of her life; see Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 6 ff. 8. Anonymous, Onna shikimoku, 11. 9. Sawada Kichi, Onna Imagawa, 209. 10. See Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, 260. 11. Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 264; this remarkably subtle text is often neglected by scholars in favor of the more stridently paternalistic Onna daigaku, which is mistakenly attributed to Ekiken. 12. Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 267–68. 13. Ibid., 267. 14. Naruse Isako, Kara nishiki. 15. Anonymous, Onna shikimoku, 10. 16. Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 269. On what types of texts were deemed appropriate for women, see Kornicki, “Unsuitable Books for Women?” 17. Anonymous, Onna shikimoku, 12. 18. Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 211. 19. Keiko Shiba, Literary Creations on the Road, 94. 20. On women’s education, see P. F. Kornicki, Mara Patessio, and G. G. Rowley, eds., The Female as Subject, esp. Kornicki, “Women, Education, and Literacy.” 21. Instructional texts written for men (i.e., the audience was either explicitly or by default male) communicate the same message about the deep shamefulness of illiteracy. See, e.g., Ronald Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan. 22. Kagetsudō Keiseki, Joyō misao bunko, 82. 23. Shibukawa Yoichi, Hōgyoku hyakunin isshu, 61. 24. Subsequent pages work through the multiplication tables in this manner, using each equation to offer a piece of advice about the importance of studying (“two times three is six: only by practicing one’s lessons each day will progress in scholarship be made”), as well as other information and advice in the supratext about such subjects as how to treat books, obey one’s parents, and learn from the ancient sages. 25. Shimokōbe Shūsui, Onna kuku no koe (Kyoto: Masuya Ichibee, 1787), in the collection of the National Diet Library, accessed at http://dl.ndl.go.jp /info:ndljp/pid/2533878. Writers of treatises on women’s education as well as writers of instructional manuals were ambivalent about the importance of mathematics in women’s education. For a complete facsimile reproduction, see Shimokōbe Shūsui, [Chigyo kyōkun] Onna kuku no koe. Namura Jōken, author

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of Onna chōhōki, considered math marginally useful, and only for merchantclass women. By contrast, Kaibara Ekiken was a vigorous advocate of math education for women: “Girls should learn to write properly, and to do arithmetic. If they cannot write and do their sums, they will not be able to manage household matters, or calculate the finances. Be sure to teach these things.” Elsewhere in Wazoku dōjikun Ekiken states that the children of commoners should learn mathematics as well as writing and “household skills.” Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 237. 26. For an annotated catalog of works in this genre, see Koizumi Yoshinaga, ed., Nyopitsu tehon kaidai. 27. Isome Tsuna, from “Fumikaki yō no shinan jū ka jō” (Ten Provisions for Teaching Women’s Writing), quoted in Koizumi Yoshinaga, “Nyopitsu tehonrui no hissha toshite no Tsuna to Myōtei,” 6. 28. Hasegawa Myōtei, from Nishiki no umi (Sea of Brocade, 1725), quoted in Koizumi, “Nyopitsu tehonrui no hissha toshite no Tsuna to Myōtei,” 7. 29. Ibid., 12. 30. Ibid. 31. For a numerical breakdown of dates and types of published calligraphic texts for women, see Koizumi, “Nyohitsu tehonrui no hissha toshite no Tsuna to Myōtei,” 2; Koizumi, Nyopitsu tehon kaidai, 3–6. 32. Koizumi, Nyopitsu tehon kaidai, 3–6. 33. In schools and in homes, teachers or parents would set young pupils to practicing writing kana or kanji, often in workbooks already completely blackened by the efforts of other pupils. Because paper was costly, only after much repetition were students allowed to make a clean copy of their work, which the teacher or parent would then evaluate. In this way, even in schools there was a great deal of time spent on self-directed study. 34. Anonymous, Onna shikimoku, 12. 35. Literacy statistics are notoriously difficult to determine for any premodern or early modern society (on the case of Japan, see Richard Rubinger, Popular Literacy in Early Moder Japan), but contemporary studies of developing countries show that educating young women and girls “can substantially enhance the voice and power of women in family decisions”; higher rates of literacy also correspond directly to declining fertility rates, greater income earning capacities, and reduced mortality rates of children. See Amartya Sen, “The Country of First Boys,” 138. 36. This is the process so compellingly discussed by Francesca Bray in Technology and Gender. 37. See Bray, Technology and Gender. Susan Mann shows the importance of women’s labor for the economic survival of a Qing literati family in The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. 38. Kaibara Ekiken, Onna daigaku takarabako, 102. 39. I Yōsai, Onna manzai takara bunko, 112. 40. Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki, 27. 41. For an overview of the development of nyōbō kotoba, see Jugaku Akiko, “Joseigo no seikaku to sono kōzō.” Nakamura Momoko schematically describes the development and popularization of nyōbō kotoba (court women’s speech)

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from the medieval through the early modern period from a linguistic perspective in “Discursive Construction of the Ideology of ‘Women’s Language.’ ” From a linguistic perspective, Risako Ide and Tomomi Terada argue that the popularization of both nyōbō kotoba and yūjo kotoba (courtesan’s speech) turned occupational language into gendered language; see Ide and Terada, “The Historical Origins of Japanese Women’s Speech.” 42. See Nagatomo Chiyoji, Chōhōki no chōhōki, 150–52; The Onna shikimoku contains a list of “correct usages for words that sound alike” and are thus easily confused. 43. Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 265. 44. Ibid. 45. See Donald H. Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan,” 145. 46. Ibid., 128–29; on later sumptuary laws directed specifically at women’s accessories, see Martha Chaiklin, “Up in the Hair.” 47. On concepts of beauty, see Suzuki Noriko, “Edo jidai no keshō to biyō ishiki.” 48. Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki, 44–45. 49. Ibid., 39–40. 50. Ibid., 41. 51. Ibid., 42. 52. The title of this text can also be read as Joyō kinmōzui, or Onna yō kinmōzui. See Okuda, Joyō kinmōzui. 53. Okuda, Joyō kinmōzui, 3:12. 54. Ibid., 3:16. 55. Namura, Onna chōhōki, 46–47. 56. The concept of the changing nature of fashions and trends as a metaphor for change in life is amplified in the diaries of the hatamoto wife Iseki Takako, who wrote, “Change, according to the occasion, is the way of the world, not only in how the hair is dressed, but in the sewing of clothes, the shapes of dyed stuffs, and in fabric patterns.” Quoted in Donald Keene, Travelers of a Hundred Ages, 378. 57. Shively, “Sumptuary Regulation and Status in Early Tokugawa Japan,” 132. 58. Namura, Onna chōhōki, 129–30. 59. A metal utensil placed on a three-legged stand, used to heat or boil things. 60. In present-day incense ritual, the tandon is made of charcoal, but here it is apparently made of the burned leavings of walnut shells and pine cones formed into a small pellet that could be lit and burned. 61. Incense made from ground fragrant woods mixed together. 62. A ginban is a small piece of silver or mother-of-pearl in the shape of a flower, upon which the incense is placed in order to heat it and release the scent. 63. An eejikago is a small (approx. 3 cm square or slightly more in circumference if round) basket woven of silver, suspended from a small hook, in which the incense to be burned is placed and held over the heat source. 64. Sorataki, lit., “air burning”: burning incense while it is suspended in midair.

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65. I.e., the person of the highest status, occupying the seat of honor reserved for him or her. 66. Namura, Onna chōhōki, 134–35. 67. Shikitei Sanba, Ukiyoburo, 184–86. 68. See Susanne Formanek, “The ‘Spectacle’ of Womanhood,” 84–86. 69. See Shimokōbe Shūsui, [Chigyo kyōkun] onna kuku no koe. For a different approach to motivations for marriage in the Tokugawa period, see William Lindsey, “Religion and the Good Life.” 70. Jishūsai Shujin, afterword to Kikka nikki, in Inoue Tsūjo zenshū (ITZ), 104. 71. ITZ, 373. 72. Such figures as the painter and poet Ema Saikō (1787–1861), writer and poet Hara Saihin (1798–1859), and writer Tadano Makuzu (1763–1825) come to mind. On the former two, see Fukushima Riko, Ema Saikō, Hara Saihin, Yanagawa Kōran. 73. A domain’s main, or upper, residence (kami yashiki) generally was reserved for the daimyo’s principal wife and heir. 74. Ōguchi Yūjirō claims that women who served in households of rank were usually forbidden to keep diaries or accounts of their time in service; see Ōguchi, Josei no iru kinsei, 222. 75. Yōjōin was not only the mother of the daimyo Kyōgoku Takatoyo; one of her brothers was a daimyo in Izumi, another son was a daimyo in Sado, and her daughter was wife of the daimyo of Tsushima, whose domain handled relations with Korea. 76. In Murasaki’s case, the patron was of course Fujiwara Michinaga (966– 1028), the regent and future father-in-law to the emperor, and the female relative was his daughter, Empress Shōshi. While Kyōgoku Takatoyo was not nearly as powerful as Michinaga, he was a known connoisseur of the arts, especially of painting and garden design. His reputation as a man of letters may have influenced his decision to bring Tsūjo into his mother’s household as a teacher. 77. For a translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s diary, see Richard Bowring, Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs. 78. A complete text of Edo nikki can be found in ITZ, 108–63. 79. ITZ, 122. It is not known exactly who Princess Karu (Karu-hime) is; likely she was a young relative of Yōjōin, since Tsūjo seems to have met with her in her mistress’s quarters. O-Yatsu and O-Run were ladies-in-waiting in Yōjōin’s service. 80. ITZ, 119; O-Ume bore Takatoyo two daughters: Inako, who became the primary wife of Matsudaira Nobutoki (1683–1744), daimyo of Hamamatsu; and Sadako, primary wife of Nishio Tadanao (1689–1760), daimyo of Yokosuka. 81. ITZ, 114. 82. When Tōemon II inherited househeadship from his father, he also inherited the name Tōemon, which became the given name of every successive Sekiguchi household head. 83. The entirety of the Sekiguchi nikki can be found in Yokohama-shi Bunkazai Kenkyū Chōsakai, ed., Sekiguchi nikki, 26 vols. On the Sekiguchi

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nikki as historical source, see also Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan, ed., “ ‘Meishu nikki’ ni kataru bakumatsu”; Yokohama Kaikō Shiryōkan and Yokohama Kinseishi Kenkyūkai, eds, Nikki ga kataru 19-seiki no Yokohama: Sekiguchi nikki to Sakai-ke monjo. 84. Ōguchi Yūjirō, “Kinkō nōson to Edo.” 85. Note that there is a rough equivalence in the time the Sekiguchi children spent away from home to complete their educations; for the boys this took place at a private academy, for the girls it was in service. 86. While having a daughter in service was clearly not a moneymaking activity, once in service the Sekiguchi daughters did receive monetary compensation that likely amounted to around two ryō per daughter per year, or about onethird of the yearly cost of keeping her in service. However, only a small fraction of those funds seemed to have been sent back home to Tōemon, who duly recorded the occasional receipt in the family diary. The remainder likely remained in the hands of the daughters themselves, to be used for incidental costs or as spending money. See Hisaki and Mita, “19-seki zenhan Edo kinkō nōson ni okeru joshi kyōiku no kenkyū,” 82–88. 87. Nagashima Junko, “Bakumatsu nōson josei no kōdō,” 151. 88. Ibid. 89. Ōguchi, “Noson josei no Edo-jo ō-oku hōkō,” 159. 90. Because they were personal attendants to the shogun or his wife, the o-chūrō themselves had the privilege of having an audience with the shogun, and they typically came from hatamoto families. By the turn of the eighteenth century, many among the o-chūrō had come to serve as concubines to the shogun. On the duties of the o-chūrō, see Seigle and Chance, Ōoku, 137–43. 91. Hata Hisako, “Servants of the Women’s Quarters,” 182. 92. Seigle and Chance, Ōoku, 112. 93. Unlike higher-ranking ladies-in-waiting who were sequestered within the castle compound, Chie was allowed to leave from time to time. During her years in service, she twice arranged to meet her father in Edo and once traveled back to Namamugi and stayed for thirteen days. In 1837 she was able to invite her mother to Edo to view the girls’ day doll display in the ō-oku, a rare privilege for commoners. Ōguchi, “Nōson josei no Edo-jo ō-oku hōkō,” 177–78. 94. The niece who became heyakata was Chie’s brother Kakichi’s daughter O-Ai; see Hata and Misaki, “Edo kinkō nōson ni okeru joshi kyōiku,” 89. 95. Ibid. 96. Seigle and Chance, Ōoku, 109. 97. Ibid., 110.

chapter 3 1. Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki, 51. 2. Ibid., 73. 3. Translated in Wm. Theodore de Bary, Carol Gluck, and Arthur Tiedemann, eds., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 2, pt. 1: 1600–1868, 13. 4. The shogunal house strategically married its daughters (biological and adopted) to allied warrior families and, most notably, into the imperial court;

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Tokugawa Ieyasu’s granddaughter Masako (fifth daughter of Ieyasu’s son, the second shogun Hidetada) became the first woman from a samurai house since early medieval times to marry a crown prince, the future emperor Go-Mizuno’o, in 1620. She subsequently assumed the title of empress in 1624. On the marriage politics of the Tokugawa shoguns, see Cecilia Segawa Seigle, “Some Observations on the Weddings of Tokugawa Shogun’s Daughters, Part I,” esp. 10–13; Atsuko Hirai, “The Legitimacy of Tokugawa Rule as Reflected in its Family Laws,” 159–60. Also during the reign of Yoshimune adultery among high-ranking warriors came to be considered tantamount to treason. 5. See Amy Stanley, “Adultery, Punishment, and Reconciliation in Tokugawa Japan,” 314. 6. Hirai, “The Legitimacy of Tokugawa Rule,” 152. 7. Ibid., 151. 8. Ibid., 149; see also Anne Walthall, “The Life Cycle of Farm Women in Tokugawa Japan,” 50–52; Satomi Kurosu, “Divorce in Early Modern Rural Japan”; Harald Fuess, Divorce in Japan, 47. 9. Fuess writes, “Statistical records confirm that divorce was a common feature of life in the Edo period. From about 6 percent to 40 percent of marriages ended in divorce. Divorce was least likely among samurai in western Japan and most likely among village outcastes. Although the evidence is not conclusive, there is a hint that the frequency of divorce rose during the Edo period.” Fuess, Divorce in Japan, 24. 10. See data compiled in Fuess, Divorce in Japan, 23. 11. On divorce law, see Diana E. Wright, “Female Crime and State Punishment in Early Modern Japan,” 18–19. 12. As Hiromi Sone explains, “Authorities thus sought to rigidify marriage relationships by coercive means, inflicting severe punishment on men and women who broke the rules.” Sone, “Prostitution and Public Authority in Early Modern Japan,” 180–81. 13. Early medieval law did recognize a difference between rape and adultery, and in the former the punishment of the woman was nonexistent or negligible. See Hitomi Tonomura, “Sexual Violence against Women.” 14. See Wright, “Female Crime,” 17–18. 15. On kenka ryōsebai, see Eiko Ikegami, The Taming of the Samurai, esp. 201–22. 16. Stanley, “Adultery, Punishment, and Reconciliation,” 319. Stanley focuses on adultery among commoners; status remained a factor in determining punishment. 17. Stanley, “Adultery, Punishment, and Reconciliation.” 18. Hirai, “The Legitimacy of Tokugawa Rule,” 188. 19. Koizumi Yoshinaga, “Edo-ki no konrei kanren sho,” 52–53. 20. On Keishōin, see Beatrice Bodart-Bailey, The Dog Shogun, 23–28. 21. By definition, daimyo had to have a minimum stipend of 10,000 koku. By comparison, at the upper end of the wealth spectrum, the Maeda, largest of the “province-holding,” or kunimochi, daimyo, had a stipend of around one million koku.

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22. Both texts can be found in Shiba Keiko, ed., Kuroda Tosako chō Ishihara-ki, Koto no hagusa: Daimyo fujin no nikki. 23. For biographical information about Kuroda Tosako and the Kuroda family and their relationship with Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, see Shiba Keiko, Edo jidai no onnatachi no sei to ai, 95–155. 24. On Tosako and the Yanagisawa, see Shiba, Edo jidai no onnatachi no sei to ai, 101–2. 25. For more details on Ishihara-ki and Tosako’s life during these years, see Marcia Yonemoto, “Outside the Inner Quarters.” 26. Kuroda Tosako, Ishihara-ki, 31. 27. Ibid., 32–33. 28. Ibid., 41. 29. In an odd coincidence, Tosako’s daughter Michiko and her two husbands, like Tosako and Naokuni, had numerous daughters but no biological sons, compelling them also to adopt male heirs. 30. Kuroda Tosako, Koto no hagusa, 97. 31. Ibid., 172. 32. Ibid., 227–28. 33. See Arima genealogy in Hotta Masaatsu, ed., Kansei chōshū shokafu. 34. Kuroda Tosako, Koto no hagusa, 269. 35. Ibid. 36. This would apply not only to families of the samurai class but also to commoner families of high standing who held official positions, such as village headmen or commoner city officials. 37. Ōguchi Yūjirō, “Kinkō nōson to Edo—Namamugi-mura no Sekiguchi Chie no hansei kara,” 187. 38. Ibid., 188–89. 39. Ibid., 189. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. On Mantokuji and Tōkeiji, the two main “divorce temples” in Tokugawa Japan, see Lindsey, Fertility and Pleasure, 159–66; Diane E. Wright, “Severing the Karmic Ties That Bind.” 42. Tōemon paid 10 ryō for Chie’s clothing allowance and 20 ryō for her upkeep fees; since he was hard-pressed to find the cash on hand, he had to borrow 10 ryō from a merchant, which he later paid back in rice. See Ōguchi, “Kinkō nōson to Edo,” 191. 43. Ōguchi, “Noson josei no Edo-jo ō-oku hōkō,”165. 44. See Fuess, Divorce in Japan, 15. 45. Ōguchi, “Nōson josei,” 180. 46. Ibid., 180–81. 47. For details on Michi’s life, see Masuda Toshimi, “Yoshino Michi no shōgai”; Anne Walthall, “Fille de paysan, epouse de samouräi.” 48. The dynamics of these adoptions and marriages, and the way each represented a move up in status for Maki, are discussed in greater depth in chapter 5. 49. Maki’s uncle Kōzaemon could have adopted a son to serve as his direct heir, but as we shall see in chapter 5, families often chose to adopt a husband

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for a daughter (such men were called muko yōshi) as a way of maintaining a lineage through female offspring, and thus privileging the maternal relatives. 50. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 27–33. 51. Ōban corps were direct retainers of the shogun whose job was to police the shogunal residences—Edo Castle in the capital, Nijo Castle in Kyoto, and Osaka Castle in Osaka. Ōban corps rotated between Edo and these two latter locales every three years. See Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 36–37. 52. On remarriage in the Japanese family, see Satomi Kurosu, “Remarriage in a Stem Family System in Early Modern Japan.” 53. The funds offered by the families of brides or adoptees were referred to by several terms, principally jisankin, usually translated as “dowry,” but also fushinkin, lit., “construction funds” for the newlyweds’ housing or other necessities. See Matsuo Mieko, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi to jisankin,” 235–69. 54. See Matsuo, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi to jisankin,”; Ōmori Eiko, Daimyo ni okeru yōshi kettei katei,” 98–121. The negotiations over dowries were conducted in Edo by representatives of each daimyo house and recorded in the private records of each family. The contrast between the “inner” records of behind-the-scenes negotiation and the “outer” records, such as genealogies, that only show a neat record of marriage between two families can be seen in many other aspects of official life in the samurai class. On “inner” versus “outer” records, see Luke Roberts, Performing the Great Peace. 55. Matsuo, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi to jisankin,” 251. 56. While adoption of males out of the Sakakibara house was generally a path of downward mobility, we can see the opposite trend pertaining in the marriages of daughters of the Sakakibara. Conversely, Yokoe Katsumi suggests that the pattern in daimyo marriages was one in which daimyo generally married among houses of equal status, but when marrying their own daughters out they chose houses of slightly lower standing than their own, and when marrying in wives for their sons they chose houses of slightly higher status than their own. Cited in Matsuo, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi to jisankin,” 242. This choice surely had to do with concern about dowry costs and benefits. 57. Inheritance of position, rather than acquiring an office through merit, became increasingly common in the eighteenth century; see Thomas C. Smith, “ ‘Merit’ as Ideology in the Tokugawa Period.” 58. See Koizumi Yoshinaga, “Kyōkunsho ni miru kinsei no saikonkan to Takushō no ‘Saienkun.’ ” 59. Wakita Osamu, “Bakuhan taisei to josei.” 60. Ibid., 1–30. 61. See Susan Mann’s acount of Miss Fa, who unhappily lives out her life with her fiancé family. Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. On widow chastity in late imperial China, see Janet M. Theiss, Disgraceful Matters; on comparisons of rates of remarriage among commoner populations and their relationship to family structure, see Saitō, “The Third Pattern of Marriage and Remarriage.” Saitō argues that by early twentieth century Japan and China were more similar in their rates of remarriage, while Koreans remarried at significantly lower rates. 62. Wakita “Bakuhan taisei to josei,” 26.

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63. Ibid., 23–24. 64. On divorce and marriage disputes among rural commoners, see Ōto Osamu, “Fufu kenka, rikon to sonraku shakai,” 186–88. 65. Hotta Masaatsu, ed., Kansei chōshū shokafu. 66. In a letter written in 1857 to her Kobayashi grandparents signed “Yōhara Tama” Tama herself writes that “in fourth month of (1851)” she moved to the Yōhara house. Mega Atsuko speculates that her husband was probably a new adoptee into the Yōhara house, to replace or supersede the feckless son with the illegitimate child. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 122. 67. Ibid., 117–18. 68. Ibid., 118. 69. Mega notes that among commoners in the early modern period, divorce was not a “minus,” and she concludes that divorce was not an obstacle to remarriage for bushi women either, in spite of the Confucian proverb that “a chaste wife does not have two husbands.” See Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 118–19. 70. Ujiie Mikito, Katakiuchi, 10–24. 71. Ibid., 16. 72. Momo Hiroyuki, “Uwanari uchi kō,” quoted in Ujiie, Katakiuchi, 16. 73. The original source can be found in Nagoya-shi Kyōiku Iinkai, ed., Momijishū, cited in Ujiie, Katakiuchi, 12–13. 74. Jin’ya nikki, in the collection of the Nagano-ken Sakuma-shi Usuda Bunka Sentaa; cited in Ujiie, Katakiuchi, 10–11. Perhaps because most of these types of disputes would have been adjudicated at the local level, by village councils or other lower-level officials, few appear in official legal records. 75. As Fuess puts it, “Japan’s high divorce rates in the past occurred in the context of a nuptial and family system that facilitated and condoned divorce because it treated marriage as conditional.” Fuess, Divorce in Japan, 47. 76. For data showing a trend of more frequent divorce and remarriage by women whose husbands were in-marrying sons-in-law, see Saitō, “The Third Pattern of Marriage and Remarriage,” 182–83; by contrast, on the difficulty among rural families of divorcing in-marrying sons-in-law, see Ōtō, “Fufu kenka, rikon to sonraku shakai.” 77. See Laurel L. Cornell, “Why Are There No Spinsters in Japan?” There is, of course, evidence of women—many of them accomplished literati—who consciously decided not to marry, such as the cross-dressing writer Hara Saihin (1798–1859) or the poet, painter, and calligrapher Ema Saikō (1787–1861). On Saikō, see Patricia Fister, Japanese Women Artists, 1600–1900, and “Female Bunjin.” On Saihin, see Laura Nenzi, “Women’s Travel Narratives in Early Modern Japan”; Fukushima, Ema Saikō, Hara Saihin, Yanagawa Kōran.

chapter 4 1. Previous estimates have put Japan’s population in 1600 as high as 18 million to 22 million, but Hayami Akira, the leading Japanese scholar of historical demography, has long argued that a more correct estimate is 12 million, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 million. For an explanation of his figures, see Hayami, The Historical Demography of Pre-Modern Japan, 39–46.

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In Japanese, see his more recent synthesis in Hayami, Rekishi jinkōgaku kenkyū. 2. The unusually rich corpus of detailed population data from early modern Japan has allowed historians and historical demographers to reconstruct a nuanced picture of family structure and population dynamics from the mid-seventeenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. The data to which I refer are the ninbetsu aratame-chō and the shumon aratame-chō, the population registers recording births, deaths, marriages, and, in some cases, out-migration and in-migration that the early modern warrior government compelled localities to maintain from the early seventeenth century on. Akira Hayami contends that these registers “may, in fact, provide more detailed information about individuals than any other such population survey performed anywhere in the world in pre-modern times.” Hayami, Historical Demography of Pre-Modern Japan, 26; see also Laurel L. Cornell and Akira Hayami, “The Shūmon aratame chō: Japan’s Population Registers.” 3. On the reverse fertility transition in northeastern Japan, see Drixler, Mabiki, 9–15; for a regional comparative approach, see Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600–1868. 4. On epidemic disease, see Ann Bowman Jannetta, Epidemics and Mortality in Early Modern Japan. 5. Evidence of positive checks on fertility can be seen in statistical analysis of village records from various parts of Japan from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, which indicate that (a) women’s fertility was limited by late marriage and/or early cessation of childbearing; (b) gaps between births after the second child were unusually long; (c) gender ordering of births was uniform to a statistically improbable degree; and (d) among the last children born in a family there was a highly unbalanced sex ratio favoring males. The latter two phenomena in particular could not have been obtained by engaging in contraception or abortion, in which the sex of the child remains unknown. While infanticide clearly was widespread, however, it is debatable whether it alone accounts for early modern Japan’s low population growth. Drixler’s recent and meticulously researched work on infanticide in eastern Japan in the early modern and modern periods greatly advances our understanding of the enormous demographic as well as social and cultural significance of infanticide and the discourses that surrounded it. Drixler proposes that in eastern Japan—the region of the country most susceptible to economic fluctuations and whose commoner population also had a long-standing reputation for practicing infanticide and abortion— systematic “thinning” of the population during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century may have resulted in the termination of, at its highest level, around 40 percent of all births and/or pregnancies. For this figure, see Drixler, Mabiki, 18. For studies of family planning and population control in villages outside the northeast, in English, see, e.g., Thomas C. Smith, Nakahara, esp. 59–85; Susan B. Hanley, “Family and Fertility in Four Tokugawa Villages”; for broad or regional comparative surveys, see Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan; Saitō Osamu, “Infanticide.” A skeptical approach to population statistics, infanticide, and their relation to fertility can be found in

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Cornell, “Infanticide in Early Modern Japan?” For important studies of pregnancy surveillance and antiabortion and anti-infanticide policies, see Sawayama Mikako, Shussan to shintai no kinsei and “Datai, mabiki kara sutego made.” 6. The term and its implications is discussed in English in Hayami, Population, Family, and Society in Pre-Modern Japan, 64–72; and has more recently been expanded in book form in Hayami, Japan’s Industrious Revolution. Jan de Vries borrows Hayami’s term in his recent study of early modern European economic history, The Industrious Revolution. 7. The locus classicus for this argument, in English, is Thomas C. Smith, “Premodern Economic Growth.” 8. In contrast to the idea that the poor in society produce more children, or at least more than they can support, there is some evidence that extreme fecundity was more characteristic of the early modern elite. Due to the practice of polygyny, an elite male could produce many offspring with numerous wives and consorts; some extreme examples are the eleventh shogun Tokugawa Ienari (1787–1834), who had some fifty-three children with his one principal wife and fifteen concubines (only about half of his offspring survived to adulthood), and the daimyo of Owari, a key Tokugawa collateral house, Tokugawa Tsunanari (1652–99), who had thirty-eight biological children with one principal wife and seventeen concubines (only seven of his offspring survived beyond the age of twelve). On the adoption of Tsunanari’s fourteenth daughter and thirty-third child by the fifth Tokugawa shogun, Tsunayoshi, see Seigle, “Some Observations on the Weddings of Tokugawa Shogun’s Daughters, Part I,” 42. 9. Economic need was not the only reason for limiting family size: in the village of Fujito in Okayama, an economically advanced area of western Honshu, the average number of persons per household (consisting of a married couple and their children) remained steady at 5.5 between 1775 to 1861, even dipping slightly in the 1860s. In villages like Fujito, where by the late Tokugawa period farm families regularly engaged in trade and commercial by-employments, it was precisely economic growth and opportunity that limited family size. In fact, there was an inverse relationship between the latter and the former: the fewer the offspring, the greater the family’s economic benefit. Hanley shows how in Fujito in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century “the form of livelihood changed for many. No longer did the landless have to work as farm laborers for the large landholders; they could work for higher wages in commerce or in handicrafts. Those with small amounts of land were, by at least the Tempo period, able to supplement their incomes with money earned from weaving in off-seasons. And families that depended on farming alone for a living now held on the average more land than they had three-quarters of a century before. . . . The increase in commercial and manufacturing activities, evidence of labor shortages, and increases in agricultural productivity and the cultivated acreage, coupled with stable family size, are indications of a rise in the per capita income and in the standard of living within Fujito.” See Susan B. Hanley, “Toward an Analysis of Demographic and Economic Change in Tokugawa Japan,” 519. Even within the samurai class, there is a direct correlation between wealth (measured in level of stipend) and family size; this is evident in the case of direct retainers of the shogun (hatamoto, or bannermen, and gokenin, or housemen),

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the mean size of whose families “decreased over time as a result of increasing economic difficulties and decreasing intraclass mobility.” See Kozo Yamamura, “Samurai Income and Demographic Change,” 75. Yamamura also notes a correlation between the decrease in family size and an increase in adoption, a subject I address in chapter 5. 10. Ochiai, “The Reproductive Revolution in Tokugawa Japan.” 11. Namura, Onna chōhōki, 83. 12. Nakamura Tekisai, Himekagami, addendum, 183. 13. Inao Kōken, Inagogusa, 223. 14. Namura, Onna chōhōki, 88–89. 15. Ibid., 90. 16. Ibid. 17. For titles and publication dates, see Koizumi Yoshinaga, Joshi yō ōraimono kanpon sōmokuroku; on the popular discourse on pregnancy and childbirth, see Sakurai Yūki, “Kinsei no ninshin shussan gensetsu.” 18. See Aya Homei, “Birth Attendants in Meiji Japan,” 410–11. 19. On depictions of male and female bodies in medical texts, see Kanazu Hidemi, “Jūhasseiki no shintaizu ni miru onna to otoko”; for illustrations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dissections of women’s bodies, see Nihon Ishi Gakkai, ed., Zuroku Nihon iji bunka shiryō shūsei, vol. 2, esp. 8–32, 74–80, 103–7. 20. Quoted in Timon Screech, “The Birth of the Anatomical Body,” 94. 21. Lindsey, Fertility and Pleasure, 118–19; the translation is Lindsey’s. 22. Ibid., 119. Lindsey does not mention or speculate on why Ranzan also reproduces the original Buddhist imagery. 23. Okada Gyokuzan, Onna zasshō kyōkun kagami, 127–29. 24. As Drixler and Sawayama show, the fifth month of pregnancy was also when women, according to pregnancy surveillance reports from several different regions, began to describe themselves as having carried a fetus or child, as opposed to having had a miscarriage. See Sawayama, Shussan to shintai no kinsei, 150; Drixler, Mabiki, 52. 25. For a comprehensive discussion of antiabortion and anti-infanticide discourse in the late Tokugawa period, see Drixler, Mabiki, 129–93; see also Sawayama, Shussan to shintai no kinsei; and Sawayama and Leicester, “The ‘Birthing Body’ and the Regulation of Conception and Childbirth in the Edo Period.” 26. On the shōrui awaremi rei, see Tsukamoto Manabu, Shōrui wo meguru seiji. See also Susan L. Burns, “The Body as Text,” 191. 27. Burns, “The Body as Text,” 192. 28. Ochiai Emiko, “The Reproductive Revolution at the End of the Tokugawa Period,” 187–215; see also Drixler, Mabiki, 138–82. 29. Homei, “Birth Attendants in Meiji Japan,” 409–11. 30. On the influence of Western medical science on Japanese medical practice, see Ellen Gardner Nakamura, Practical Pursuits. 31. Burns notes that, by contrast, the late seventeenth-century antiinfanticide rhetoric does not censure abortion and even acknowledges that it might be necessary in some cases. Burns, “The Body as Text,” 192.

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32. Ochiai, “Reproductive Revolution,” 212. 33. Drixler, Mabiki, esp. 178–82. 34. See Sawayama, Shussan to shintai no kinsei, Sei to seishoku no kinsei, and “The ‘Birthing Body.’ ” 35. Sawayama, “The ‘Birthing Body,’ ” 29. 36. Wakita Haruko, “Bosei sonchō shisō to zaigōkan,” 203. 37. See Elizabeth G. Harrison, “Strands of Complexity”; Hank Glassman, “At the Crossroads of Birth and Death.” 38. Hitomi Tonomura, “Birth-Giving and Avoidance Taboo.” 39. Burns, “The Body as Text,” 219. 40. See in particular Ko, Haboush, and Piggott’s characterization of “Confucianization as civilizing process,” in Women and Confucian Cultures, 8–18. 41. As the Onna chōhōki describes it: “At the birth, two midwives (toriagebaba) should be present, one to attend to the child and one to attend to the mother. One midwife should not serve both the mother and the child. If there is only one midwife, [just after the birth] she must attend to the mother, and so she will have to leave the child lying [by itself] on a mat. In that instant, when it makes its first cry the baby will swallow poisons from inside the womb, and it will [later] suffer from smallpox, rashes, and the like.” Namura, Onna chōhōki, 112. 42. The implications of this undercurrent of restraint in discourses on reproduction are many, as are the questions it raises. We might ask, for example, how the patrilineal family system survived if fertility remained low in the eighteenth century. One answer to this question is addressed in chapter 5, which focuses on an unexpected yet very important dimension of early modern family life: the role played within families by nonbiological offspring, namely, adopted children. In early modern Japan women could and did become mothers without actually bearing children, and it was this phenomenon—the frequent adoption of children as well as adults, kin as well as nonkin—that perhaps best exemplifies why, as contemporary commentators argued, reproductive success was only one measure of a woman’s capabilities. 43. Sawada Kichi, Onna Imagawa, 207–9. 44. Namura, Onna chōhōki, 21. 45. Ibid., 24. 46. Asai Ryōi, Honchō jokan shō, 343–411. 47. One should acknowledge that, as discussed in chapter 1, there is the figure of Kesa Gozen, who sacrifices herself for her husband as well as her mother. 48. Kaibara Ekiken, Wazoku dōjikun, 270–71. 49. Nakamura Kōki, Fushikun, 3–21. 50. Nakamura Kōki, Jokun san no michi. 51. Hayashi Kana, “Ken narazaru tsuma to wa—jokunsho ni miru ie to onna,” 89. 52. Sakurai Yūki, “Haha to ko no monogatari,” 213–17. 53. For a discussion of “Horie no maki zōshi,” see Sakurai Yūki, “Haha to ko no monogatari,” 216; for an edited version of the play, see see Shinoda Jun’ichi and Sakaguchi Hiroyuki, eds., Kojōruri sekkyō shū.

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54. Ibid., 215–16. For an edited version of “Oguri,” see Shinoda Jun’ichi and Sakaguchi Hiroyuki, eds., Kojōruri sekkyō shū. An English translation of Oguri can be found in R. Keller Kimbrough, ed. and trans., Wondrous Brutal Fictions, 123–60. 55. Osaka monogatari, in Watanabe Morikuni and Watanabe Kenji, eds., Kanazōshi shū. 56. Sakurai, in “Haha to ko no monogatari,” sees this as a uniquely “early modern” perspective. 57. Sakurai, “Haha to ko no monogatari,” 222. 58. Both plays can be found in Yūda Yoshio, ed., Bunraku jōrurishū; both also have been translated into English by Stanleigh H. Jones Jr. as Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy and Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees. 59. Jones, ed. and trans., Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees, 185. 60. Another example of a mother forced to witness the sacrifice of her son is the 1777 kabuki play by Nagawa Kamesuke et al., Meiboku Sendai hagi (The Precious Incense and Autumn Flowers of Sendai); for an English translation, see Brandon and Leiter, Kabuki Plays On-Stage, 2:50–71. 61. Sakurai, “Haha to ko no monogatari,” 222. 62. The details of this adoption are discussed in chapter 5. 63. Okada Tatsujirō and Nagai Torao, Masumi no kagami Inoue Tsūjo, 194. 64. Chikaishi Yasuaki, “Inoue Tsūjo shōden narabi ni nenpyō,” in Inoue Tsūjo zenshū, 374. 65. Ibid., 375. 66. Ibid., 378–79. 67. Ibid., 377. 68. Ibid., 376. 69. Kuroda, Koto no hagusa, 113. 70. Ibid., 289. 71. Ibid., 80. 72. Ibid., 81. 73. On Chie’s marriage and the birth of her son, see Ōguchi Yūjirō, “Nōson josei no Edo-jō ō-oku hōkō,” 162–65; Ōguchi, “Kinkō nōson to Edo.” 74. On Sekiguchi Junji’s marriages, see Nagashima Junko, “Bakumatsu nōson josei no kōdō no jiyū to kaji rōdō,” 155; see also Ōguchi Yūjirō, “ ‘Goten oba’: Sekiguchi Chie no sei to shi.” 75. Nagashima Junko, “Bakumatsu nōson josei no kōdō no jiyū to kaji rōdō,” 155. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid., 146–55.

chapter 5 1. There are examples of inheritance of house headship by women in the early modern period, but the cases are overwhelmingly those in which the husband or father died and house headship was passed onto a wife or daughter, but only temporarily, until a suitable male came of age or could be adopted or married into the family to serve as heir. See Yanagiya Keiko’s analysis of cases of

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female house headship and inheritance in northeastern Honshu in Kinsei no josei sōzoku to kaigo. Inheritance and family headship by women was common in the medieval period, but under warrior dominance the practice ceased by the fourteenth century; see Hitomi Tonomura, “Women and Inheritance in Japan’s Early Warrior Society.” On the politics of “name” and the fragility of lineage and family in the medieval era, see David Spafford, “What’s in a Name?” 2. Son-in-law adoption to continue a lineage remains the most common form of adoption in Japan today. 3. For a comparative study of kinship and succession in early modern China, Japan, and Korea, see Evelyn S. Rawski, Early Modern China and Northeast Asia, 144–87. 4. The history of adoption in Japan from 1600 to the present—focusing on the dramatic transformation in adoption practices in the twentieth century—is the subject of my next book. 5. On debates over nonagnatic (not related through male kin) adoption, see I. J. McMullen, “Non-Agnatic Adoption.” The Tokugawa shogunate issued more than two dozen addenda to the “Laws for the Military Houses” (Buke shohatto, originally issued in 1615) concerning adoption within the samurai class. All are recorded in Takayanagi Shinzō and Ishii Ryōsuke, eds., Ofuregaki Kanpō shūsei (Colletion of Edicts from the Kanpō Era [1741–44]). 6. Fifth shogun Tsunayoshi adopted three daughters, eighth shogun Yoshimune one, tenth shogun Ieharu one, and twelfth shogun Ieyoshi two. Although he adopted no daughters, the eleventh shogun, Ienari, managed to have twelve biological daughters by eleven different consorts, and the fifteenth and last shogun, Yoshinobu, adopted none but had eight biological daughters by two consorts. For a complete list of all the Tokugawa shoguns’ biological and adopted daughters, see Shiba Keiko, “Tokugawa shogun-ke no himetachi,” 217–21. On marriages of adopted daughters of the Tokugawa, see Cecilia Segawa Seigle, “Some Observations on the Weddings of Tokugawa Shogun’s Daughters, Part I and Part II.” 7. The decrease in the number of adoptions as Tokugawa rule strengthens indicates that such politically motivated exchanges of daughters (and wives as well) were perhaps a variation on hostage-taking and gift-giving, both processes that emerged from the tenuous nature of late medieval/Warring States politics. On this subject, see Mary Elizabeth Berry, “Public Peace and Private Attachment.” 8. On female infanticide in China, see D. E. Mungello, Drowning Girls in China. 9. In-marrying husbands were much less common in late imperial China, although certain regions and classes, such as literati families in parts of the Jiangnan region of southwestern China, were known to marry uxorilocally; however, they rarely adopted the son-in-law as heir. On uxorilocal marriage among Jiangnan elites, see Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. Korean families did not practice son-in-law adoption until it was forced on them under Japanese colonial rule in the 1930s; see Sungyun Lim, “Enemies of the Lineage.” 10. Possible explanations for the dearth of writings on adoption are that it was so common as to be unremarkable; that debates over the importance of

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adopting from within the kin group inhibited authors from taking a stand on the issue; that adoption followed established rules and principles but tended also to be case-specific and therefore resistant to generalization. 11. Sanda Yoshikatsu, Yōshi kun. 12. An adoptive son in late imperial China was caught between his obligation to offer full mourning rites (and thus ritual filial devotion) to his adoptive parents and maintaining putatively organic emotional ties to his natal parents. On Chinese views of adopted child-parent relations, see Ann Waltner, “The Loyalty of Adopted Sons in Ming and Early Qing China.” 13. Waltner, “The Loyalty of Adopted Sons,” 441. 14. In preserving his mother’s literary legacy, Sanda Yoshikatsu acted much as did men in late imperial Chinese literati families whose members included talented women (guixiu). The relatives of guixiu often collected and circulated the writings, poetry, calligraphy, or artworks of their female kin. For a key example of this, see Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family. 15. Hayami, “The Myth of Primogeniture and Impartible Inheritance in Tokugawa Japan.” 16. For example, some merchant house codes state explicitly that the house head had the authority to order that any family member, male or female, who was guilty of “misconduct” (kokoroe chigai) be punished by “forced retirement” (oshikomi inkyō), thus forfeiting any position of power she or he might hold within the family. Other merchant family heads stated unambiguously that anyone aspiring to inherit house headship must be a “person of talent,” specifically, one who had been sent out at a young age to serve or apprentice in another household in order to learn necessary skills. As one house head put it, “Those who have not gone into service are useless as successors.” Cited in Yonemura Chiyo, “Ie” no sonzoku senryaku, 102. 17. In merchant houses in particular, capable employees were often given considerable power in the family business, and in wealthy families these employees could be set up as heads of separate houses (bekke), subordinate but tightly related to the main family. In the eighteenth century, the Shimomura family, founders of what became the Daimaru conglomerate, made a practice of marrying their daughters into their most successful bekke houses, thus formalizing an economic relationship through marriage and shared bloodline. The Itō family, whose enterprises were the antecedents of the Matsuzakaya department store chain, made a practice of adopting their most talented employees and then later establishing them as heads of their own separate houses, which were of course bound by adoptive family ties to the main house. There were often restrictions on bekke, including prohibiting them from going into the same business as the main family (honke). Families were limited in the number of separate houses they could establish, both financially and by the restrictions of larger governing entities of which they were a part, such as guilds (in the case of merchants’ houses) or villages (in the case of farming families). The internal succession process of an individual house was thus shaped by that house’s place within the larger community of which it was a part. See Yonemura, “Ie” no sonzoku senryaku, 110. 18. Adoption was frequent among commoners as well. On the extreme end are the four villages studied by Susan Hanley and Kozo Yamamura where over

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half (53 percent) of families adopted children. In the village of Numa between 1860 and 1871, there were more recorded adoptions than marriages. See Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, 229–30. 19. Ray A. Moore, “Adoption and Samurai Mobility in Tokugawa Japan,” 618. 20. Ibid., 618–19. 21. Records also show cases in which even childless non-Matsudaira widows, who ordinarily would have been “returned” to their natal families after the deaths of their husbands, were kept in the Matsudaira family via adoption by their late husbands’ parents. See Wakita Osamu, “Bakuhan taisei to josei,” 27, 29. 22. Wakita, “Bakuhan taisei to josei,” 28. 23. Ibid., 27. 24. Ōto Osamu shows that among rural commoners, divorcing a muko yōshi could be more difficult than cases of ordinary divorce because the adopted son-in-law was the intended heir. Such cases thus had to be presented to village councils, which had the authority to order the couple to remain married in the interests of preserving the integrity of household and succession. See Ōto, “Fūfu kenka, rikon to sonraku shakai,” 198–200. 25. Among large tozama daimyo houses in the same period, approximately three-fourths of adopted heirs were from within the kin group and approximately one-fourth were from outside it. In both the Matsudaira and the tozama daimyo cases, it seems clear that when adopting a male heir, families preferred a blood relative, but when adopting a son-in-law, they tended to choose individuals who were not kin. See Ōguchi Yūjirō, “Kinsei buke sozoku ni okeru isei yōshi.” 26. Tsubouchi, Danshō no jinkō shakaigaku, 101–3. 27. Ibid., 101. 28. Ibid., tables 6–7, 6–8(1), 6–8(2), and 6–8(3), 102–3. 29. Tsubouchi’s data also yield information relevant to the increase in the overall number of adoptions in the mid- to late Tokugawa period. Tsubouchi collated data on reasons for lineage extinction (kakei no danzetsu) that show that in certain domains lack of heirs was not a determining factor in lineage extinction after the seventeenth century; e.g., in Morioka in the seventeenth century there were 80 cases of lineage extinction: the most frequently cited reason for extinction was crime (25 cases), and the close second was lack of heirs (23). But in the eighteenth century, the reasons shifted: out of 338 cases of lineage extinction, absconding by the heir was the most frequent reason (129 cases), crime slipped to second (103), and lack of heirs fell to a distant third place (14). In the nineteenth century, out of 41 cases of extinction, the most frequent reason was absconding (22 cases), second was crime (11), suicide third (1), then “other” (6). In no cases was lack of heirs cited as the reason for extinction. See Tsubouchi, Danshō no jinkō shakaigaku, 57–60. So while bushi houses were going extinct at a much faster pace in the eighteenth century, the problem was not lack of heirs. The concomitant rise in rates of adoption suggests that adoption solved the problem of heirs if not of lineage extinction itself. In addition to this data, research by Taniguchi Sumio on Okayama domain shows a rate of adoption among all samurai there of about 30 percent; Harafuji Hiroshi’s

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study of Kanazawa shows rates of adoption among samurai of nearly 50 percent, numbers more comparable to those from domains studied by Tsubouchi. See Taniguchi Sumio, Okayama hansei-shi no kenkyū; Harafuji Hiroshi, Keijihō to minjihō, vol. 4. 30. Yamakawa, Women of the Mito Domain, 102. 31. Of the five adoptions, two were of close kin (sons of branch families and younger brothers) and one was from an unrelated daimyo house (the Ōsuka). The twelfth-generation heir, Masakiyo (1798–1846), had no children and so adopted his own younger brother Masachika (1814–61) as his heir, and Masachika, who had two daughters but no sons, in turn adopted another brother, Masataka (1843–1927) as the fourteenth and final heir. See Matsuo Mieko, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi to jisankin,” 242–46. 32. The notable exceptions are two sons of the eleventh-generation heir, Masanori (1776–1861), who, perhaps because of the reputation their father had gained as a successful reformer, and also because the revived domain finances allowed for the furnishing of hefty jisankin, were adopted by the Hosokawa (Hitachi, 163,000 koku) and the Inaba (Tango, 102,000 koku). While the family sending the adoptee (in this case the Sakakibara) was obliged to furnish dowry funds to the adopting family, the amount correlated to the receiving family’s status. In cases where the receiving family was of lower status, the dowry funds were less. See Matsuo, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi to jisankin,” 245–46. 33. Yamakawa, The Women of Mito Domain, 103. 34. Ibid. 35. As we saw in chapter 3, rural commoner families who adopted a sonin-law as heir and then sought to divorce him from their daughter often were compelled to get formal approval from village councils or five-family groups, on the grounds that they were endangering household and therefore community integrity; see Ōto, “Fūfu kenka, rikon to sonraku shakai.” 36. Both Tsūjo and her younger sister Setsu had married into other houses before the death of their younger brother, so neither of them could provide a muko yōshi to continue the family line. 37. Katsutomi was the son of Sanda Munehisa’s sister, who had married into the Noma family, and Katsutomi thus began life as a Noma. However, Katsutomi was adopted by his uncle Sanda Denzaemon, thereby taking the Sanda name and ultimately succeeding to the headship of Denzaemon’s family on the latter’s death, a position that was later passed on to Yoshikatsu. 38. Naokuni and Tosako’s firstborn child, also a daughter, died in infancy. 39. Under shogunal law first-cousin adoptions were allowed, and in fact there were few if any restrictions or taboos pertaining to close kin marriages in Japan in the premodern period. If anything, close kin marriages within the imperial court nobility during the classical period served as a key strategy for families aiming to consolidate and increase their power in a political system that privileged lineage ties over all else. On the Heian marriage system, see William McCullough, “Japanese Marriage Institutions in the Heian Period”; and Peter Nickerson, “The Meaning of Matrilocality.” 40. Toshiko wed Kuki Takanobu (1700–1786), daimyo of Hayashida in Harima (wealth assessed at 10,000 koku); Toyoko married Matsudaira

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Tadaakira (1691–1712), daimyo of Kōri (20,000 koku); and half sister Kumiko married Naitō Masaatsu (1711–41), daimyo of Yunagaya (15,000 koku). 41. Naozumi’s sons with the concubine were Naohiro, Kamejirō, and Naoyoshi. 42. Contrast the Kuroda tactics of son-in-law adoption with that of the Noma family, cited above, in which close cousin marriage was used to preserve the bloodline of an adopted heir’s natal family. Although adopted sons-in-law were sometimes nonkin, both forms of marriage can be considered endogamous. Anthropologists have long observed that in many patrilineal cultures endogamous marriage is a means to keep resources transmitted through women and maternal kin within the patriline; this, too, argues for the importance of women in the early modern Japanese family system. On endogamy and family relations, see Jack Goody, Production and Reproduction, 21; on women, inheritance, and family structure, see also Hitomi Tonomura, “Women and Inheritance in Japan’s Early Warrior Society.” 43. Kuroda, Koto no hagusa, 134. 44. There was only one other official at this level, the Sunpu kabanyaku, who was in charge of defending Ieyasu’s strategically located home territory. Both kabanyaku were appointed from among the ranks of daimyo. 45. Now the famous public park Rikugien, in northern Tokyo. 46. Kuroda, Koto no hagusa, 152. 47. Ibid., 175. 48. Ibid., 283. 49. Buyō Inshi uses the term jisankin, which referred to a woman’s dowry and in cases of adoption to the funds paid to the adopting family. It is not clear whether he is referring here only to cases of son-in-law adoption or using the term more broadly to refer to fees that passed between the parties to any adoption. Buyō Inshi, Seiji kenbunroku, vol. 1: Bushi no koto. Quoted in Matsuo, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi no jisankin,” 236. See also the full-length English translation of Seiji kenbunroku, in Buyō Inshi, Lust, Commerce, and Corruption. 50. Quoted in Matsuo, “Kinsei buke no kon’in, yōshi no jisankin,” 237. 51. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 18–23. 52. In a case of drastic understatement, Mega Atsuko comments that because the Itō had resorted to adoption so many times in the generations leading up to Ito Kaname’s headship, “it would not be inappropriate to say that it was a house whose bloodline was in the process of being lost.” Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 43. 53. The sum pales in comparison to the thousands of ryō exchanged as dowry among high-ranking daimyo families like the aforementioned Sakakibara and Nabeshima; it is indicative of the vast differences in wealth and power within the samurai class. 54. On the practice of kari yōshi among daimyo houses in the midTokugawa period, see Ōmori Eiko, “Kinsei chūki ni okeru daimyō-ke no kari yōshi,” 54–85. 55. In this case the financial survival of the house trumped the biological prerogatives of the patriline; see Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 48–51.

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56. For details on ireko, see Mizutani Mitsuhiro, Edo no yakunin jijo— “Yoshino zōshi” no sekai. 57. For details on the Yamamuro, see Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 84. 58. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 88–89. 59. See Mizutani Mitsuhiro, Edo no yakunin jijo. 60. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 92. 61. Ibid., 92. 62. With regard to readoption, Tokugawa law permitted serial adoption for women but not for men. This is to say that women could be adopted by one family and then adopted and/or married out again from the adopting family to another family, without “return” to her natal family, after the death of the husband or the termination of the marriage. See Kamata Hiroshi, “Bushi shakai no yōshi.” 63. Quoted in Iwamoto Yoshiteru, “Ie sonzoku senryaku toshite no yōshi, muko yōshi,” 47. 64. In the Meiji period, one sees new indications of the pressures felt by adopted sons-in-law in the form of newspaper reports of violent crimes perpetrated by such men, usually against their adoptive wives and families. Even a cursory review of one major newspaper during the decade 1875 to 1885 reveals that there were twenty reports of violent acts by adopted sons-in-law published in the Yomiuri shinbun. See Yomiuri shibun, Yomidas rekishi database.

chapter 6 1. On versions of the tale, see Laurel L. Cornell, “The Deaths of Old Women”; “Obasuteyama,” in Mori Rintarō, ed., Nihon otogi shū. On negative portrayals and ostracism of the aged, see Susanne Formanek, “Traditional Concepts and Images of Old Age in Japan.” It is worth noting that although in the original tale it is both women and men over the age of sixty who are supposed to be abandoned, over time the legend has come to focus on abandoning old women, and the name of the mountain itself references only “discarded” women. 2. Cornell, “The Deaths of Old Women,” 80–87. 3. On retirement and succession in peasant families, see Laurel. L. Cornell, “Retirement, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Conflict in Preindustrial Japan.” There was considerable regional variation in retirement practices among rural families—rates of antemortem retirement were relatively high in the southwest but much lower in the northeast, except in Nihonmatsu. See Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, “A Comparative Study of Family Transmission Systems in the Central Pyrenees and Northeastern Japan.” 4. In cases where women assumed house headship after the death of their husbands, that authority was often passed on to a new spouse or to a son during the woman’s lifetime, but this act seems not to have been deemed “retirement.” See Fauve-Chamoux, “A Comparative Study of Family Transmission Systems.” The more common form of retirement for women in Tokugawa Japan was informal and conventional. 5. Kagetsudō Keiseki, Joyō misao bunko, 4. 6. Anonymous, Hyakunin isshu; Anonymous, Jokyō taizen hime bunko, both undated, late Edo period.

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7. Kiyohara Nobuaki, Onna shisho geibun zue, 8–9. 8. Yasui Joan, Onna kakun, 12. 9. Emori Ichirō, ed., Edo jidai josei seikatsu ezu jiten, 3:13–16. 10. Sawada Kichi, Onna Imagawa, 89. 11. “Fujin shichi hō e shō,” in Tsurugaya Kyūbee, Onna yūshoku mibae bunko, 99. 12. From Shikitei Sanba, Ukiyōburo, translated in Robert W. Leutner, Shikitei Sanba and the Comic Tradition in Edo Fiction, 173–77. 13. Ibid., 182. 14. Susanne Formanek, “The ‘Spectacle’ of Womanhood,” 80. 15. Ibid., 80–81. 16. Ibid., 82–83. 17. In another of the variants on shusse sugoroku for women, the “game” is to go into service in a household of rank, and the “goal” is to become the wife of the lord himself. See also Susanne Formanek, “Traditional Concepts and Images of Old Age in Japan.” 18. Okitsu Kaname, Edo senryū sansaku, 65. 19. Ibid. 20. Yamanashi Shigako, Haru no michikusa, in Maeda Yoshi, Kinsei nyōnin no tabi nikki shū; see also Shiba Keiko, Kinsei onna tabi nikki jiten, 127. 21. Kutsugake Nakako, Azuma ji no ki, in Maeda, Kinsei nyōnin no tabi nikki shū; see also Shiba, Kinsei no onna tabi nikki jiten, 168–71. On Tachibana Moribe and his school, see Susan L. Burns, Before the Nation, 158–86. 22. See Shiba, Kinsei onna tabi nikki, 10. 23. Ibid., 8–10. 24. Ibid., 10. 25. For Kikusha-ni’s collected writings, see Ueno Sachiko, ed. Tagami Kikusha zenshū. On Kikusha-ni’s life and work, see Makoto Ueda, “Tagami Kikusha,” in Far Beyond the Field. On Kikusha-ni as tea practitioner, see Rebecca Corbett, “Crafting Identity as a Tea Practitioner in Early Modern Japan.” 26. Okada, Masumi no kagami Inoue Tsūjo, 211–16. 27. Ibid., 217. 28. Kuroda, Koto no hagusa, 50–51. 29. Ibid., 242. 30. Ibid., 243. 31. Ibid., 245. 32. Yokohama-shi Bunkazai Chōsakai, ed., Sekiguchi nikki, vol. 8, entry for Tenpō 10/8/18. 33. Ibid., Vol. 9, entry Tenpō 11/4/25. 34. Ibid., Vol. 9, entries for Tenpō 11/5/25 and Tenpō 11/7/16. 35. Ōguchi, “Noson josei no Edo-jo ō-oku hōkō,” 183. 36. Ibid., 182–85. 37. Ibid., 188. 38. Ibid., 190. 39. Nagashima Junko, “Bakumatsu nōson josei no kōdō to jiyū to kaji rōdō,” 145. 40. Nagashima, “Bakumatsu nōson josei,” 146.

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41. Ibid., table, 147. 42. Ibid., 148. 43. Ibid., 148–50. 44. Ibid., 152. 45. Ibid., 153. 46. Ibid., 153–55. 47. Ibid., 152–53. 48. Ibid., 153–57. 49. Ibid., 162–63, 165. 50. Ibid., 168. 51. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 123. 52. As we saw in chapter 5, she also concerned herself with the issue of securing succession in her natal family, the Kobayashi. 53. Mega, Buke ni totsuida, 96. 54. Ibid., 98–99. 55. Ibid., 100–102. 56. Tadano Makuzu, Mukashibanashi; see also Kado Reiko, Waga Makuzu monogatari; Bettina Gramlich-Oka, Thinking Like a Man. 57. Tadano Makuzu, Okushūbanashi, in Suzuki Yoneko, ed., Tadano Makuzu shū. 58. For a biography of Taseko, see Anne Walthall, The Weak Body of a Useless Woman. 59. Life expectancy in early modern Japan is difficult to estimate reliably; Susan Hanley argues that life expectancy among rural commoners ranged from early thirties in the early Tokugawa period to early forties by the mid-nineteenth century, with some outlier villages showing female life expectancy into the early seventies. The nineteenth-century figures compared favorably to life expectancy in contemporary Western Europe. See Hanley, “Fertility, Mortality, and Life Expectancy in Pre-Modern Japan,” esp. 140–42. See also Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan, 135–37.

conclusion 1. See Eleanor Warnock, “Japan PM Abe Tells Women to ‘Shine,’ But Critics Find Unintended Meaning,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2014. Much to the chagrin of the Abe administration, which quickly took down the offending page and redesigned the blog’s graphics and title, the “shine” post gained international attention, most of it poking fun at the malapropism: the British newspaper the Independent titled its article on the controversy, “Die! All Women, to a Sparkly Japan,” Independent, June 25, 2014. 2. “Womenomics” is not a term the Abe administration itself invented. It first appeared in a 1999 research paper by Kathy Matsui, chief equity strategist and co-head of Asia investment research in the Tokyo office of Goldman Sachs. For more than a decade Matsui had been urging the Japanese government to undertake the very sorts of policies Abe only began to promote in 2014; she is now an oft-quoted and consulted authority on Japanese economic and gender

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equality policies. For an updated version of the paper, see Matsui et al., “Womenomics 4.0.” 3. The report’s authors write, “To be clear, we are by no means arguing that every Japanese woman should work outside the home. The decision to work outside the home or not is obviously an individual and personal choice. Rather, our argument is that Japanese women who desire to work outside the home (especially on a full-time basis) should not only be given the opportunity but be encouraged to do so.” Matsui et al., “Womenomics 4.0,” 5–6. For a comprehensive analysis of womenomics, see Linda C. Hasunuma, “Gender Gaiatsu.” 4. “Holding Back Half the Nation,” Economist, Mar. 29, 2014; Abe’s response can be read as an example of what the political scientist Linda Hasunuma calls “gender gaiatsu,” or external pressures on Japan to reform gender roles and move toward greater gender equality. See Hasunuma, “Gender Gaiatsu.” 5. The statistic is for the employment rate of women ages 15–64; see Danielle Paquette, “How American Women Fell Behind Japanese Women in the Workplace,” Washington Post, Oct. 7, 2015. 6. This is in spite of the fact that Japanese women can receive fifty-eight weeks of maternity leave, twenty-six of which are paid—benefits that are far more generous than those in the United States. See Paquette, “How American Women Fell Behind Japanese Women in the Workplace.” Japan’s M-curve of women’s employment has gotten less severe over time; for a discussion and graph of the M-curve, see Matsui et al., “Womenomics 4.0,” 12. 7. Scott Dixon, “Role Models Needed for Abe’s ‘Womenomics’ to Work: Panel,” Japan Times, Dec. 9, 2015. 8. William Pesek, “A Woman Who Could Revive Japan’s Fortunes,” Japan Times, Sept. 8, 2015. 9. Statistics from the World Bank, “Proportion of seats held by women in national parliaments (%)”; figures represent “the percentage of parliamentary seats in a single or lower chamber held by women.” http://data.worldbank.org /indicator/SG.GEN.PARL.ZS See also Matsui et al., “Womenomics 4.0,” 12–13. 10. Matsui et al., “Womenomics 4.0,” 14. 11. Japan’s global index score was 0.670, on a scale where 1.0 represents complete equality and 0 drastic inequality. Iceland ranked first with a score of 0.881, the United States was 28th with a score of 0.740, China 91st with a score of 0.682. Japan, at 101st, ranked immediately below Gambia, Hungary, and Cyprus and just above Swaziland, Belize, and Malta. See table 3, “Global Rankings, 2015,” in World Economic Forum, “The Global Gender Gap Report 2015,” 8–9. 12. Shinzo Abe, “When Women Thrive, So Will the World,” Bloomberg View, Apr. 24, 2015. 13. “Holding Back Half the Nation,” Economist, Mar. 29, 2014. 14. See Philip Brasor, “Wrath Awaits Japanese Women Who Shun Their Childbearing ‘Destiny,’” Japan Times, May 21, 2016. 15. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description,” 17. As an anthropologist, Geertz was referring primarily to behavior and action in the moment, observable by

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the ethnographer in the field, but his ideas have been adopted widely by historians using textual sources; a classic example is Robert Darnton, “Workers Revolt.” 16. Bray, Technology and Gender, 157. 17. See “Holding Back Half the Nation,” Economist, Mar. 29, 2014. 18. Ibid. 19. On the koseki and contemporary debates surrounding it, see Krogness and Chapman, eds., Japan’s Household Registration System and Citizenship. The Japanese legal system is not entirely biased against women; it is often noted that the postwar Japanese constitution, written under the heavy influence of the Allied Occupation, contains a clause stipulating equality of the sexes, a principle notably still lacking in the U.S. Constitution.

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Index

Note: t indicates a table; ch indicates a chart; and f indicates a figure. Abe Shinzō, 217–18, 219, 220, 225n4, 256n1 abortion, 124, 133, 137–38, 244n5 adoption: Buyō Inshi on, 185–86; in China, 249n9, 250n12; and class status, 186; of close vs. distant vs. nonkin, 173, 178, 251n25; of daughters, in samurai class, 166; and divorce, 173, 251n24; effects of, on men, 190–92, 254n64; and family structure, 10–11; as family survival strategy, 165–66; and filial piety, 169–170; and financial issues, 174, 176–79, 187, 189–190; household codes (kakun) on, 170, 171; instructional texts on, 167–69; ireko adoption, 188, 189; in Korea, 228n28, 249n9; for noninheriting younger sons, 178; and patrilineal family system, 247n42; as political strategy, 166; premarital, 113; rates of, 174, 251–52n29; and readoption for men vs. women, 254n62; of sons-in-law, 117, 165, 170–71, 173–75, 177–79, 191, 228n28, 241–42n49, 249n2; succession by, 171, 172t, 173; and upward mobility, 99, 100, 112, 186–89, 190–91; women’s role in arranging, 165, 189–190; and women’s status, 174–75, 190; in women’s writings, 180–190. See also succession

adultery, 97–98, 240n4, 240n13 age: women’s roles based on, 16–17. See also retirement antiabortion movements, 133, 137 anti-infanticide movements, 133, 137, 246n31 Aoki Kazuyoshi, 177–78 appearance. See beauty and appearance arts and cultural attainments: incense, 79–80, 237nn60–64; musical skills, 78–79 Asai Ryōi, Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm), 25–27 Atherton, David, 232n28 Azuma ji no nikki (Diary of Travels to the East), 202–3 Bacon, Alice, 4 beauty and appearance: clothing, 75–76, 77f, 78; eyebrows, 75, 75f; hair care, 73–74, 74f; importance of, 91–92; instructional texts on, 72–78; legal restrictions on, 71–72; makeup, 72–73; vs. virtue, 71 Berry, Mary Elizabeth, 6 biographies of exemplary women: Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East), 31–36, 232–33n43; Honchō jokan shō (Mirror

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Index

biographies of exemplary women (continued) of Women of Our Realm), 25–27; Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Paragons of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm), 27–31; as models for filial piety, 24–25; mothers as absent from, 142; suicide in, 26–27, 29–31, 230–31n17 ‘blood-pool hell’ concept, 138 board games (sugoroku), 198–99, 200f Bray, Francesca, 221 Buddhism: and filial piety, 231n27; in Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm), 25–26; in Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Paragons of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm), 29–30 Burns, Susan, 139, 246n31 Buyō Inshi, Seiji kenbunroku (Record of Political Matters Seen and Heard), 185–86 calligraphy skills, 63–65, 65f ‘castle topplers’ (keisei), 40 Chichibu dōchū oboe (Recollections of a Journey to Chichibu), 203 Chichibu zumurai junrei no ki (Account of the Route through Chichibu), 203–4 childbearing. See reproduction and childbearing children, maternal influence on, 143–44 China: adoption of sons-in-law in, 249n9, 250n12; family gender roles in, vs. Japan, 13; filial piety in, 23; infanticide in, vs. Japan, 166–67; marriage in, vs. Japan, 109; remarriage in, vs. Japan, 117; succession patterns in, vs. Japan, 10–11 class status: and adoption, 186; and divorce, 116; instructional texts on women’s behavior by, 56; and women’s speech, 69. See also commoner class; upward mobility; warrior class; women, commoner; women, elite clothing, 75–76, 77f, 78. See also beauty and appearance comic poems (senryū), 200–201 commoner class: divorce among, 243n69, 252n35; marriage laws for, 96; as readers, 28; stem family structure in, 11–12. See also upward mobility; women, commoner Confucianism: filial piety in, 23, 169; and rise of patriarchal ideology, 139; and self-cultivation, 53–54

courtesans, 75, 76, 77f, 78. See also ‘castle topplers’ (keisei) Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East): filial piety in, 31–36, 232–33n43; overview of, 32; revenge plots in, 32–35; scholarship on, 232n35 Daoism, 23 Date Iori, 177 daughters-in-law: relationship with mothers-in-law, 196–97. See also filial piety demographic records, 8, 25, 227–28n21, 242n54, 244n2 diaries and memoirs: filial piety in, 37–48; marriage in, 102–5, 112–14; motherhood in, 152, 155–162; as private reflection on women’s roles, 6–7; remarriage in, 118–120; retirement in, 205–14; self-cultivation in, 83–91; succession in, 180–190. See also specific writers disorder: adulterers as agents of, 97, 98; women’s potential for, 2, 5. See also sociopolitical order divorce: across class status, 116; and adoption, 173, 251n24; among commoner women, 118, 243n69, 252n35; among elite women, 116–17; costs of, 122; rates of, 97, 240n9, 243n75; in Sekiguchi nikki (Sekiguchi Diary), 110–11; and women’s agency, 122. See also marriage drama and fiction: filial piety in tales of, 36–37; motherhood in, 125, 145–152; retirement in, 196–97. See also comic poems (senryū); specific works Drixler, Fabian, 10, 137, 244n5 economics: and adoption, 174, 176–79, 187, 189–190; and daughters in service, 239n86; and education of children, 213–14; and family planning, 245– 46n9; and marriage, 114–16; of modern Japan, 217–18, 222. See also ‘womenomics’ Edo nikki (Edo Diary), 84, 85, 86 education: calligraphy skills, 63–65, 65f; of elite women, 83; fetal, 127–130; financial issues regarding, 213–14; gendered divisions in, 66; mathematics in, for women, 235–36n25; and mothers as primary teachers of children, 143–44;

Index reading and writing, 60–66; as self-cultivation, 59–82; study vs. learning, 59, 91; and upward mobility, 87, 88; for women, 56, 58–59, 60–66. See also learning; study Eguchi, courtesan of, 26 epistolary writings: of Itō Maki, 7, 46–48. See also Itō Maki families: adoption as survival strategy for, 165–66; as business, 12, 165, 250n17; etymology of word, 12; filial piety as furthering success of, 49–50; and lineage extinction, 251–52n29; as primary institution in early Japanese life, 9, 15; relationship of daughter-in-law with mother-in-law, 196–97; size of, and wealth, 245–46n9. See also filial piety family planning, 124, 138, 163, 245–46n9 family structure: and bilateral kinship, 10; in early modern Japan, 9–13; and gender roles, 13–16; in Japan vs. China or Korea, 10; power relations within, 13–14; as reinforcing state structures, 15–16; as ‘stem family,’ 9–11; succession patterns, 10–11; women’s importance in, 10–11, 14, 16, 163, 164–65, 220, 221, 253n42. See also stem family structure fashion. See beauty and appearance; clothing fathers, and education of children, 83–84 fertility patterns, 18, 244n5. See also population growth fetal development, 129–133, 129f, 131f, 132f, 134–36f, 137–38 fetal education, 127–130 fiction. See drama and fiction filial piety: and adoption, 169–170; biographies of exemplary women as models for, 24–25; and Buddhism, 231n27; changes in ideals of, over time, 21–22; in China, 23; of commoners, 46; in Confucian thought, 169; in Confucian vs. Daoist thought, 23; in Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East), 31–36, 232–33n43; defined, 22, 49–50; in diaries and memoirs, 37–48; in drama and fiction, 36–37; vs. geronticide, 194; in Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi (The Tale of Shiroishi and the Taihei Chronicles), 36–37; in Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm),

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25–27; in Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Paragons of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm), 27–31; ideals of, as widespread, 49; in Inoue’s writings, 39–41; in instructional texts, 141; in Itō’s writings, 46–48; Kankoku kōgiroku (Official Record of Filial Piety), 23–24; in Korea, 23; towards in-laws, 42, 45, 94, 109, 196; in Musume katakiuchi kokyō no nishiki (Hometown Brocade of a Daughter’s Vendetta), 37; in Nakayama Suzuko’s writings, 42–45; revenge plots in tales of, 24–25, 32–35; and violence, 230n9; and women’s devotion to mothers, 231n19 Formanek, Suzanne, 198 Fuess, Harald, 240n9, 243n75 Fujii Mondayū, 43 Fujii-shi onna no ki (Account of a Woman of the Fujii Clan), 41–44 Fujiwara Michinaga, 120 Fujiwara no Yukinari, 120 Fukuzawa Yukichi, 3, 225–26n6 Fushikun (Precepts for Fathers and Children), 143, 144 Geertz, Clifford, 220, 257–58n15 gender inequality, 257n11 gender roles: and Confucianism, 139; and education, 66; and family structure, 13–16; in “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō” (Methods for Teaching Girls), 57–58; in modern Japan, 217–220; of mothers vs. fathers, 143, 144; Neo-Confucian ideals of, 14; and ‘thrice following’ concept, 56–57, 58, 235n7 geronticide, 193–94 Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi (The Tale of Shiroishi and the Taihei Chronicles), 36–37 hair care, 73–74, 74f. See also beauty and appearance Hanley, Susan B., 245n9, 256n59 Haruna Suma, 65 Haru no michikusa (Spring Grass Along the Wayside), 202 Hasegawa Myōtei, 64 Hayami Akira, 124, 170, 244n2 Himekagami (Mirror for Princesses), 127–28 Hirai, Atsuko, 98 Hirata Atsutane, 216

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Index

Hōgyoku hyakunin isshu (Jewel-Treasures of the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets), 61, 62fHonchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm): Buddhism in, 25–26; filial piety in, 25–27; learned women in, 26; suicide in, 26–27 Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Paragons of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm): ambiguity of tales in, 31; Buddhism in, 29–30; devotion to fathers in, 28–31; filial piety in, 27–31, 231n19; overview of, 27–28; source of, 231n18; suicide in, 29–31 Horie no maki zōshi (Tales of Horie), 145 house headship: eldest son as inheritor of, 9–10; power of, 250n16; women inheritors of, 248–49n1, 254n4 household codes (kakun), on adoption, 170, 171 Ihara Saikaku, 232n28 Imagawa Sadayo, 234n1 Inao Kōken, Inagogusa (Grasshopper Manual), 128 incense, 79–80, 237nn60–64 industrialization, and population stabilization, 123–24 infanticide, 124, 133, 137–38, 244n5; female, in China vs. Japan, 166–67 infertility, 126–27, 143 Inoue Motokata, 38, 83 Inoue Nao, 4 Inoue Tsūjo: and adoption, 180–81; contrast between writings and life of, 41; education of, 61, 83–84; father’s support of, 83–84; as female traveler, 1–2; and filial piety, 39–41; jokunsho (ethical texts for women) by, 38–39; literary accomplishments of, 38–39, 40, 83–87; as mother, 152, 155–57; as mother-in-law, 205; personal narratives by, 7; as tutor (jidoku), 2, 40, 84, 85; retirement of, 205–6; and succession, 180–81; on women’s role, 39, 40; works: Edo nikki (Edo Diary), 84, 85, 86; Kikka nikki (Diary of a Trip Home), 83, 205; Shinkei ki (Chronicle of the Inner Chambers), 39, 40; Shojo no fu (Precepts for Young Girls), 39–40; Tōkai kikō (Journey to the Eastern Seas), 38, 40, 205 instructional texts (joshi yō ōraimono): on adoption, 167–69; audience of, 227n16;

on beauty and appearance, 72–78; on calligraphy skills, 63–65, 65f; on childbearing, 126–27, 139–140, 247n41; on class status and women’s behavior, 56; on fetal development, 131–33, 131f, 132f; on fetal education, 127–130; filial piety in, 141; on marriage, 94–95; on motherhood, 124–27, 141–42, 143–44, 146–47; mothers as absent from, 141; on musical skills, 78–79; overview of, 5–6; precision in descriptions of, 80; as public discourse on women’s roles, 6; on reading and writing, 60–66; retirement in, 195–96; on self-cultivation, 54, 55–59; on sewing skills, 67–68, 68f, 69f; study vs. learning in, 59; and upward mobility, 70–71, 78, 82; Western scholarly neglect of, 6; on women’s speech, 69–70. See also self-cultivation; specific works Ishihara-ki (Record of Ishihara), 100, 102–3, 157 Ishimoto (Katō) Shidzué, 4 Isome Tsuna, 64 Itō Kaname, 113 Itō Maki: and adoption, 186–190; adoption of, 112–13, 186; and divorce, 119–120; epistolary writings of, 7, 46–48; family of, 47ch; filial piety of, 46–48; marriage of, 113; and remarriage, 119–120; remarriage of, 113–14; retirement of, 213–14; and succession, 186–190; upward mobility of, 112 Iwashita Kinoko, Chichibu zumurai junrei no ki (Account of the Route through Chichibu), 203–4 Izumi Shikibu, 26 Japan: gender inequality in modern-day, 257n11; gender roles in, vs. China, 13; gender roles in modern-day, 217–220, 222; infanticide in, vs. China, 166–67; marriage in, vs. China, 109; as patriarchal society, 222; population of, in 1600, 243n1; remarriage in, vs. China, 117; succession patterns in, vs. China or Korea, 10–11; Tokugawa period vs. modern day, 222 Jingu, Empress, 25 Jin’ya nikki (Diary from the Headquarters), 121 Jokun san no michi (Three Paths of Moral Teachings for Women), 144

Index jokunsho (ethical texts for women), Inoue as author of, 38–39 “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō” (Methods for Teaching Girls): on divorce, 142–43; on ‘followership’ for women, 57–58; gender roles in, 57–58; on infertility, 127. See also Kaibara Ekiken Joyō kunmōzui (Illustrated Compendium for the Cultivation of Women): on clothing, 76, 77f, 78; on eyebrows, 75, 75f; on hairstyles, 74–75, 74f; and material culture of self-cultivation, 80–81 Joyō misao bunkō (Collected Works on Women’s Propriety), 61, 195–96 Kagawa Gen’etsu, Sanka ron (Obstetrical Theory), 137 Kaibara Ekiken: on beauty as troublesome, 91–92; on divorce, 142–43; on ‘followership’ for women, 57–58; on gender roles, 57–58; on infertility, 127; on mathematics education for women, 235–36n25; on self-cultivation, 54; on virtue vs. beauty, 71; on women’s education, 60, 82; works: “Joshi wo oshiyuru hō,” 57–58, 127, 142–43 Kankoku kōgiroku (Official Record of Filial Piety), 23–24 Kara nishiki (A Chinese Brocade), 58–59 Kawamura Matsugorō, 107, 108 Keishōin, 99 Kesa Gozen, 26–27 Kikka nikki (Record of a Trip Home), 83, 205 Kishida Toshiko, 3–4 Ko, Dorothy, 57, 235n7 Kobayashi Reisuke, 46 Kōmyō, Empress, 25–26 Korea: adoption of son-in-laws in, 228n28, 249n9; filial piety in, 23; succession patterns in, vs. Japan, 10–11 koto, 79 Koto no hagusa (Words of Leaves and Grasses), 45, 100, 103–5, 118, 157, 159, 160, 206, 207 Kuroda Naokuni, 44, 101–2, 206–7 Kuroda Tosako: and adoption, 182–85; adoption of, 101, 182; daughters excluded from narrative by, 118–19; family of, 101ch; on marriage, 103–5; marriage of, 102; as mother, 157–160; personal narratives by, 7; retirement of, 206–8; and succession, 182–85; widowhood of, 206–7; works:

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Ishihara-ki (Record of Ishihara), 100, 102–3, 157; Koto no hagusa (Words of Leaves and Grasses), 45, 100, 103–5, 118, 157, 159, 160, 206, 207 Kutsugake Nakako, 204; Azuma ji no nikki (Diary of Travels to the East), 202–3 Kyōgoku Takatoyo, 40 laws and regulations: on adultery, 97–98; on divorce, 97; and gender equality, 258n19; on infanticide and abortion, 137–38; on marriage, 95–97; on readoption, 254n62 Laws of Zhou, 144 learning: arts and cultural attainments, 78–82; beauty and appearance, 71–78; defined, 59; proper speech, 68–71; sewing skills, 67–68. See also education life course, women’s roles based on, 16–17 life expectancy, 256n59 Lindsey, William, 131, 132 lineage extinction, 251–52n29 literacy, 18, 227n19, 235n21, 236n35. See also reading and writing Liu Xiang, Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women), 23, 142 makeup, 72–73. See also beauty and appearance marriage: and adoption of male heirs, 117, 165, 170–71, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178–79; anti-adultery laws, 97–98; in China vs. Japan, 109; of close kin, 252n39; for commoner class, 96; in diaries and memoirs, 102–5, 112–14; divorce rates, 97; and financial issues, 114–16; ideal vs. reality of, 93; instructional texts on, 94–95; in Itō’s writings, 112–14; in Kuroda family, 102; in Kuroda Tosako’s writings, 103–5; legal discourse on, 95–97; as path to upward mobility, 82, 96, 99–100, 112, 113, 114; and premarital adoption, 113; and samurai class, 95–96; in Sekiguchi nikki (Sekiguchi Diary), 106–11; wedding ceremony, 95; women’s role in arranging, 105, 111, 112; in women’s writings, 180–190. See also divorce; remarriage material culture, of self-cultivation, 80–81 maternity leave, 257n6 mathematics, 235–36n25 Matsudaira house, 173, 251n21, 251n25

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Matsudaira Yorinori, Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East), 31–36, 232–33n43 Matsui, Kathy, 256–57nn1–2 Matsuoka Kunio. See Yanagita Kunio Matsuo Mieko, 114 Matsuo Taseko, 214, 215–16 Mega Atsuko, 243n69 Meiji period: role of women as wives and mothers, 4; women’s rights activists during, 3–4 men, as adoptees, 190–92, 254n64 Mencius, 54, 60, 141–42 Miyamoto Musashi, 28–29 Miyoshi Shōraku, 146 mobility, 18 Momijishū (Collection of Autumn Leaves), 120–21 Moore, Ray, 171, 173 motherhood: biological aspects of, 124–140; in diaries and memoirs, 152, 155–162; in drama and fiction, 125, 145–152; and education of children, 60; and fetal education, 127–130; and Inoue Tsūjo, 152, 155–57; in instructional texts, 124–27, 141–42, 143–44, 146–47; in Kuroda Tosako’s writings, 157–160; in Sekiguchi nikki (Sekiguchi Diary), 161–62; social aspects of, 125, 140–44; and stem family structure, 162–63; in visual arts, 147, 148f–151f, 152, 153f, 154f; and women’s agency, 163. See also childbearing mothers: as absent from instructional texts, 141; as absent in exemplary women tales, 142; and ken (propriety), 144; as primary educators of children, 143–44; role of, vs. fathers, 143, 144; sexualization of, in art, 147, 152; women’s devotion to, 231n19 mothers-in-law: relationship with daughtersin-law, 196–97. See also filial piety Mukashibanashi (Tale of Times Past), 214. See also Tadano Makuzu muko yōshi (adopted sons-in-law): see adoption, of sons-in-law Murasaki Shikibu, 26, 84 musical skills, instructional texts on, 78–79 Musume katakiuchi kokyō no nishiki (Hometown Brocade of a Daughter’s Vendetta), 37 Nagai Torao, 155 Nagano Hiroko, 14

Nagashima Junko, 211, 213 Nakamura Kōki: Fushikun (Precepts for Fathers and Children), 143, 144; Jokun san no michi (Three Paths of Moral Teachings for Women), 144 Nakamura Sōhei, 113 Nakamura Tekisai, Himekagami (Mirror for Princesses), 127–28 Nakayama Naoharu, 42 Nakayama Suzuko: assassination of father, 43; filial piety of, 42–45; in Koto no hagusa (Kuroda), 45; literary accomplishments of, 41–42; personal narratives by, 7; works: Fujii-shi onna no ki (Account of a Woman of the Fujii Clan), 41–44; Suzuko nikki (Suzuko’s Diary), 44 Namiki Sōsuke, 146 Namura Jōhaku, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasure for Women), 52–53, 66, 126–130, 129f Naruse Isako: education of, 61; Kara nishiki (A Chinese Brocade), 58–59 Neo-Confucianism: conjugal harmony emphasized in, 14; filial piety in, 23. See also Confucianism Nihon shoki (Records of Japan), 25 Nishikawa Jōken, 133 Obasuteyama (‘Old Woman-Abandoning Mountain’), 193–94, 254n1 obstetrical medicine, 130–31, 137 Ochiai Emiko, 124, 137 Ōgimachi Machiko, 43, 160 Ōguchi Yūjirō, 107, 110, 173, 209 Oguri, 145 Okada Gyokuzan, Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women), 132–33, 134f–36f Okada Tatsujirō, 155, 205–6 Ōkuma Tsugi, 204; Chichibu dōchū oboe (Recollections of a Journey to Chichibu), 203 O-Miyo (Senkōin), 99–100 Onna chōhōki (Great Treasure for Women): and appearance of learnedness, 66; on beauty and appearance, 72–74; on childbearing, 126–27; on childbirth, 247n41; on clothing, 75–76; fetal development, 129–130, 129f, 131–32, 131f, 132f; on fetal education, 128–29; filial piety in, 141; on incense, 79–80; on marriage, 94–95; on motherhood, 141–42; on musical skills, 78–79; on self-cultivation,

Index 52–53; on shamisen, 78; on speech, 69; and women’s speech, 69 Onna daigaku (Greater Learning for Women): Ishimoto (Katō) Shidzué on, 4; on literacy and sewing skills, 67, 68f; on sewing skills, 67, 68f; tone of, 53 Onna Imagawa (Imagawa-Style Admonitions for Women): on filial piety towards in-laws, 196; on self-cultivation, 51–52; on women as followers, 56–57 Onna kakun (Household Precepts for Women), 196 Onna kuku no koe (Ninety-Nine Voices for Women), 61, 63, 63f Onna manzai takara bunkō (Collected Works on Women’s Treasures of 10,000 Years), 67–68, 69f Onna rongo (The Analects for Women), 144 Onna shikimoku (Rules for Women), 56, 60, 66 onna sōdō (‘women’s disturbances’). See revenge plots Onna zassho kyōkun kagami (Mirror of Assorted Teachings for Women), 132–33, 134f–36f orthopraxy, 221–22 Ōsaka monogatari (Tales of Osaka), 145 Ōshūbanashi (Tales of the Northeast), 214–15 Ōtō Osamu, 251n24 Patessio, Mara, 226n11 patriarchy, of Japanese state, 222 poetry. See comic poems (senryū); drama and fiction polygyny, 245n8 population: in 1600, 243n1; in public records, 244n2 population growth: and laws regulating abortion and infanticide, 137–38; and ‘reverse fertility transition,’ 123–24. See also fertility patterns power dynamics: and age/seniority, 16–17; within family structure, 13–14; of mothers- and daughters-in-law, 197–98; and women’s roles in family structure, 13–14, 16 praxis, 220 pregnancy. See motherhood; reproduction and childbearing pro-natalism, 125–140. See also reproduction and childbearing

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puppet plays, 145–46. See also drama and fiction rape, 97, 240n13 reading and writing: calligraphy skills, 63–65, 65f; Hōgyoku hyakunin isshu (Jewel-Treasures of the Hundred Poems by a Hundred Poets) on, 61, 62f; instructional texts on, 60–66; Joyō misao bunkō (Collected Works on Women’s Propriety) on, 61; Onna kuku no koe (Ninety-Nine Voices for Women), 61, 63, 63f readoption, 254n62 remarriage: in China vs. Japan, 117; in diaries and memoirs, 118–120; of elite women, 116–17; in revenge plots, 120–21. See also divorce; marriage reproduction and childbearing: and abortion, 124, 133, 137–38, 244n5; and ‘blood-pool hell’ concept, 138; and family planning, 124, 138, 163, 245–46n9; fetal development, 129–130, 129f, 131–33, 131f, 132f, 137–38; fetus as valued over mother, 138; and infanticide, 124, 133, 137–38, 166–67, 244n5; instructional texts on, 126–27, 139–140, 247n41; and obstetrical medicine, 130–31; and ubuya trope, 138–39; and women’s agency, 127, 137–140. See also motherhood retirement: benefits of, 198, 216; in board games (sugoroku), 198–99, 200f; in comic poems, 200–201; defined, 201; in diaries and memoirs, 205–14; in drama and fiction, 196–97; in Inoue’s writings, 205–6; in instructional texts, 195–96; in Itō’s writings, 213–14; in Kuroda’s writings, 206–8; literary production in, 214–15; and power dynamics of mothers- and daughters-in law, 197–98; process of, 195; in Sekiguchi nikki (Sekiguchi Diary), 208–13; and stem family structure, 194–95; and travel writing, 201–5; and widowhood, 204–5 revenge plots: in Daitō fujo teiretsu ki (Record of Exemplary Women in the Great East), 32–35; in Go Taiheiki Shiroishi banashi (The Tale of Shiroishi and the Taihei Chronicles), 36–37; in Musume katakiuchi kokyō no nishiki (Hometown Brocade of a Daughter’s Vendetta), 37; as popular in tales of filial

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revenge plots (continued) piety, 24–25; remarriage in, 120–21. See also violence ‘reverse fertility transition,’ 123–24 Sakakibara house, 114–17, 176, 242n56 Sakurai Yūki, 145, 146 samurai class: and adoption of daughters, 166; adoption rates of, 252–52n29; finances of marriage for, 114–16; marriage laws for, 95–96; succession among, 11, 164; women of, 8. See also women, elite Sanda Munehisa, 40, 41 Sanda Yoshikatsu, 250n14; as biographer and son of Inoue, 38; as editor of Inoue’s poetry, 205; on Inoue, 83; on parent-child relations, 169–170; works: Yōshi kun (Precepts on Adoption), 167–170, 171. See also Inoue Tsūjo Santō Kyōden, 32 Sawada Kichi, Onna Imagawa (ImagawaStyle Admonitions for Women), 51–52 Sawayama Mikako, 138 Scott, Joan W., 19 Seiji kenbunroku (Record of Political Matters Seen and Heard), 185–86. See also Buyō Inshi Sekiguchi Chie, 100; aborted marriage of, 107; career in service, 88, 89–90, 105–6, 107, 109, 239n86, 239n93; closeness with natal family, 109; education of, 61, 88–89; marriage of, 107–8; as mother, 108–9, 161; refusal of adoption for, 89, 106; refusal of marriage proposal, 109–10; retirement of, 208–10, 213; self-cultivation and upward mobility of, 87, 88–91; widowhood of, 108 Sekiguchi Junji, 110–11, 161 Sekiguchi nikki (Sekiguchi Diary): authors of, 88, 91; on Chie’s death, 209–10; divorce in, 110–11; motherhood in, 161–62; O-Rie’s moneylending business, 212; overview of, 7–8 Sekiguchi O-Ie, 208, 210–11, 212–13 Sekiguchi O-Rie, 208, 210–13 Sekiguchi Tōemon II, 88, 108 self-cultivation: arts and cultural attainments, 78–82; beauty and appearance, 71–78; calligraphy skills, 63–65, 65f; and Confucianism, 53–54; defined, 53–54; in diaries and memoirs, 83–91; education as, 59–82; instructional texts on, 54, 55–59; material culture of,

80–81; proper speech, 68–71; reading and writing, 60–66; sewing skills, 67–68; societal impact of, 54–55; in Tokugawa period, vs. modern era, 55; upward mobility as goal of, 81–82, 99; women’s agency in, 55. See also instructional texts (joshi yō ōraimono) self-sacrifice. See suicide sewing skills, 67–68 sexualization, of mothers, in art, 147, 152 shamisen, 78 Shiba Keiko, 204 Shikitei Sanba, 81; Ukiyōburo, 196–97 Shinkei ki (Chronicle of the Inner Chambers), 39, 40 Shively, Donald H., 78 Shojo no fu (Precepts for Young Girls), 39–40 Skinner, G. William, 13 sociability, and upward mobility, 92 social class. See class status social mobility. See upward mobility sociopolitical order: adultery as offense against, 97, 98, 240n4. See also disorder Soga monogatari (Soga Tales), 37 speech, as index of cultivation, 68–71 Stanley, Amy, 98 state structure, family structure as reinforcing, 15–16 stem family structure: in commoner class, 11–12; defined, 9–10; membership based on role, 12; and motherhood, 162–63; vs. other structures, 10; patrilineal, and adoption, 247n42; and retirement, 194–95; in warrior class, 11. See also families; family structure study: defined, 59; reading and writing, 60–66. See also education succession: and adopted vs. biological sons, 175; and adoption of male heirs, 117, 165, 170–71, 172t, 173, 191, 241– 42n49; among samurai class, 11, 164; in diaries and memoirs, 180–190; in Japan vs. China or Korea, 10–11; women’s role in, 165; in women’s writings, 180–190. See also adoption Sugawara Denju tenarai kagami (Sugawara and the Secrets of Calligraphy), 145–46 Sugiura Tamesaku, 113 suicide: in Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm), 26–27; in Honchō onna nijūshi kō (Twenty-Four Paragons of Women’s Filial Piety in Our Realm), 29–31; in revenge plots,

Index 121–22; in tales of exemplary women, 26–27, 29–31, 230–31n17 sumptuary laws, 71–72 Suzuki Harunobu, 147 Tachibana Moribe, 203 Tadano Makuzu: Mukashibanashi (Tale of Times Past), 214; Ōshūbanashi (Tales of the Northeast), 214–15 Tagami Michi (Kikusha-ni), 204 Takai Ranzan, Onna chōhōki (Great Treasure for Women), 131 Takeda Izumo, 146 Theiss, Janet, 231n17 ‘thrice following’ concept, 56–57, 58, 235n7. See also Ko, Dorothy Tōkai kikō (Journey to the Eastern Seas), 38, 40, 205 Tokugawa Ieyasu, 166 Tokugawa Mitsukuni, 41, 43 Tokugawa period: contradictory vision of women’s roles in, 4–5; vs. modern-day Japan, 222; self-cultivation in, vs. modern era, 55 Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, 102, 133 Tokugawa Yoshimune, 92 Tonomura, Hitomi, 138–39 travel writing, 201–5 Tsubouchi Reiko, 174 ubuya (birthing or parturition house), 138–39 Ukiyōburo (Bathhouse of the Floating World), 81, 196–97 ukiyoe. See visual arts upward mobility: and adoption, 99, 100, 112, 186–89, 190–91; in board games (sugoroku), 198–99, 200f; education as path to, 87, 88; as goal of self-cultivation, 81–82, 99; and instructional texts, 70–71, 78, 82; marriage as path to, 82, 96, 99–100, 112, 113, 114; of Sekiguchi Chie, 88–91; and sociability, 92. See also class status Utagawa Kunisada: Jisei hyakkachō (One Hundred Birds of Today), 147, 148f; Kodakara asobi (Playful Child-Treasures), 147, 150f Utagawa Kuniyoshi, 147; Myōdensu jūroku rikan, Taben Sonja (Sixteen Curious Considerations of Profit: Taben Sonja), 148f Utagawa Toyokuni, 147; Edo meisho hyakunin bijo, Tameike (One Hundred

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Beautiful Women and the Famous Places of Edo: Tameike), 151f Utagawa Utamaro, 152; Furo kachō (Cloth-Tub Mosquito Netting), 153f; Meisho ūkei bijin jūnisō (Twelve Physiognomies of Beautiful Women in Famous Places), 154f uwanari-uchi (successor-wife revenge plots). See revenge plots violence: by adopted sons-in-law, 254n64; in Nakayama’s life, 43; rape, 97, 240n13; in service of filial piety, 24–25, 230n9. See also revenge plots visual arts: motherhood in, 147, 148f–151f, 152, 153f, 154f; sexualization of mothers in, 147, 152 Wakita Haruko, 138 Wakita Osamu, 116, 117, 173 Walthall, Anne, 111 warrior class. See samurai class; women, elite Watanabe Ei, 38 Watanabe Hiroshi, 14, 15 widowhood. See retirement women: adoption, and status of, 174–75, 190; as ‘castle topplers’ (keisei), 40; and childbearing, 127, 137–140; as de facto heirs, 15; education for, 56, 58–59, 60–66; as ‘followers’ of men, 57; Fukuzawa on, 3; and house headship, 248–49n1, 254n4; importance of, in family structure, 10–11, 14, 16, 163, 164–65, 220, 221, 253n42; ‘inner realm’ as sphere of, 58; learned, in Honchō jokan shō (Mirror of Women of Our Realm), 26; literacy of, 227n19; Meiji-period view of, 4; in modern Japan, 217–220, 222; policing of, as travelers, 225n2; and potential for disorder, 2, 5; and private interests, 2; Tokugawa-period view of, 4–5; travelers as suspect, 1–2 women, commoner: divorce among, 118, 243n69; filial piety of, 46; marriage choice of, 98–99; restrictions on lavish dress, 72; scholarship on, vs. elite women, 8; travel writing of, 202–4; upward mobility of, through education, 87, 88, 91. See also commoner class; upward mobility women, elite: divorce among, 116–17; education of, 83; marriage choice of,

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women, elite (continued) 98–99; powerful roles of, 14; remarriage of, 116–17; scholarship on, vs. commoner women, 8; speech of, 69. See also warrior class ‘womenomics,’ 218, 256–57nn1–2 women’s rights, Meiji-period demands for, 3–4 women’s roles: in adoption arrangements, 165, 189–190; based on life course, 16–17; in divorce, 122; instructional texts as public discourse on, 6; in marriage arrangements, 105, 111, 112; in marriage choice, 98–99; and motherhood, 163; ‘orthopraxy’ of, 221–22; personal narratives as private reflection on, 6–7; as powerful, 13–14, 16; as praxis, 220; in self-cultivation,

55; in stem family structure, 10–11, 14, 16, 163, 164–65, 220, 221, 253n42; in succession process, 165 Yamakawa Kikue, 175, 179 Yamanashi Shigako, 204; Haru no michikusa (Spring Grass Along the Wayside), 202 Yanagita Kunio, 190–92 Yokoe Katsumi, 242n56 Yōshi kun (Precepts on Adoption), 167–170, 171 Yoshino Michi, 111 Yoshitsune senbonzakura (Yoshitsune and the Ten Thousand Cherry Trees), 145–46 Zhu Xi, 39